Duo ready for Cleethorpes RNLI service
TWO more crew members have joined Cleethorpes RNLI to bolster the life-saving squad – after scooping a share of a £1-million funding pot.
Darren Weatherill, 33, and Jordan Peterson, 19, have been taught crucial survival skills needed to save lives at sea thanks to funding from the Lloyd's Register Educational Trust (LRET).
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JOINING UP: Darren Weatherill and Jordan Peterson are the new life-savers to join Cleethorpes' RNLI.
Darren and Jordan, like the rest of the crew, are volunteers and have been training for 18 months. After completing a trainee crew course at RNLI's College's Sea Survival Centre in Poole, Dorset, they are now fully-fledged members of the crew.
Jordan said: "We spent a week at the college, where we got to see the headquarters and the scale of the wider RNLI organisation.
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"We met crew members from all over the UK and Ireland and I really enjoyed the experience.
"Parts of the training we undertook at the college simply cannot be done in the same way locally in an operational lifeboat, and so I found this particularly valuable."
The importance of sea safety has hit the national headlines in the last few weeks.
Four-year-old Dylan Cecil drowned after falling into the water from a jetty at Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset on August 19.
A week later, two-year-old Jamie Beaton and his five-year-old brother Ewen drowned after a canoeing accident in a Scottish loch.
Their father, Ewen Senior, 32, is missing, presumed dead. Another child, Grace Mackay, five, also died.
Darren and Jordan, who are both from Cleethorpes, were taught how to "abandon ship", cope in a life raft in simulated darkness, deal with lifeboat fires and how to right a capsized inshore lifeboat. They were also taught team survival swimming and the importance of life jackets.
Training resembles real-life scenarios as closely as possible, using highly technical equipment like a wave tank and firefighting simulator. LRET is an independent charity which funds work to enhance the safety of life and property at sea, on land and in the air. It is funding the sea survival element of the trainee crew course for five years.
Jack Barlow, Cleethorpes RNLI's lifeboat operations manager, said: "The support given by The Lloyd's Register Educational Trust is hugely important to the RNLI.
"We are extremely grateful it has chosen to fund sea survival training, which teaches vital core skills to our volunteer crew.
"This training is central to allowing the RNLI and its volunteers to stay safe while on rescue missions.
"It equips volunteers with essential sea survival skills and provides them with the courage, poise and self-confidence to save lives, even in the most perilous seas."
Get involved
Find out how you can get involved with the RNLI by visiting www.rnli.org
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