Stefanie Carr grew up in Woodquay in Galway city, right beside the river. She spent her childhood by the water, and always had a love for it.
Even so, she had no boating background when she joined the RNLI as shore crew in 2009, before joining the lifeboat crew in 2011. She works at an all-boys secondary school in the city.
When the pager goes off, her crew like to have the boat on the sea within 10 minutes. This can be difficult for Carr, who may be in the classroom teaching maths equations, or perhaps in the PE hall, when that happens.
“I need to go and get someone to supervise them [the students] before I leave, and for us, you don’t know how long you’re going to be out,” Carr explains. It can be difficult for her to get the rest of her day’s classes supervised and down to the station within that time, and it is not always possible.
“I’d say I’m the only one of the crew who can’t drop everything, the rest of them can leave work. For me, from a health and safety point of view, I have to make sure all the ducks are in a row before I leave,” she says.
But most of the callouts are outside of her 9am-4pm schedule, which brings another challenge.
“Even if it isn’t a call that takes all night, it’s very difficult to switch off, to sleep after. There have been many, many nights where I would have been awake all night and I just get up and go into school and teach away, and a lot of people wouldn’t know the difference,” she says, “it takes a long time to wind down”.
Even if the midnight callout only lasts 30 minutes, the crew usually has a debrief afterwards, and must always prepare the boat before they leave, for when the pager goes off again.
“You just get on with it. I love teaching, so when I go in, no more than when I go out in the boat, you just click into it,” Carr says, “and sure if I’m tired in school, I can sleep the next night”.
Being in Galway, Carr’s station is sometimes tasked with finding people in the river Corrib, which runs through the city.
“The RNLI is saving lives at sea, but unfortunately sometimes it doesn’t work out like that. It could be a callout where someone has been missing, or someone has gone in the river and we can’t save them,” she says.
“But the attitude I’ve always taken is that this is someone’s family member who is missing. It is so important to bring them home.”
The family is at the forefront of Carr’s mind when doing recoveries in the water, and no matter how difficult the situation, she says it is worth it.
“Knowing that you’re part of something bigger than yourself, that helps save lives at sea, that helps save people when they’re in difficulty, I think it’s an absolute privilege to be a part of.
“You can be at a family occasion and the pager goes off and you’re gone, there’s lots of times that happens. I was out for dinner with a friend on Quay Street, having dinner and next thing I up and run off,” Carr says.
“The table next to him said to my friend, ‘What did you say to her to make her run off so fast?’,” she laughs.
It is a 24-hour job.
Eugene Kehoe went out on the lifeboat at Kilmore Quay, Co Wexford, for the first time in 1977, aged 18.
That night, the lifeboat – The Lady Murphy – capsized twice, and the crew lost one of their men. Kehoe has been with them since then, almost 50 years, 20 of those as coxswain.
Everything he learned originally, he learned on the boat. But nowadays crew are sent to the RNLI’s UK college in Poole before becoming lifeboat crew.
Now aged 64, Kehoe began helping launch the boat on the shore aged 10 or 11 years old.
“In those days, the boat was on a carriage, and it had to go down and be [put] in and out on the beach, so you used to have to pull timber skids around to pull the boat back up, it took a lot of people to get them on and off the trailer. But you were always waiting for your chance to get on the boat,” Kehoe says.
His grandfather was coxswain, his father head launcher, his uncle and two brothers were involved, and now his son-in-law and two nephews are part of the crew as well. They are a lifeboat family.
That comes with the territory, Kehoe says, coming from a fishing background. He owns a marine shop a stone’s throw from the RNLI station, so, being self-employed, if his pager goes off alerting him of a callout, he can close up shop or, ideally, leave the shop in the hands of an employee. But that depends on the urgency of the callout, as some of his employees are also lifeboat crew.
Many volunteers are allowed to leave work for callouts and make up time later, he explains.
“Anyone that is born around the area, they are brought up with it so they understand that it’s not every day of the week that you’re doing it,” Kehoe says.
Kehoe has seen a lot of change and modernisation in the RNLI over the years, but the premise stays the same. Save lives at sea, and if you cannot, then try take that person’s remains home to their families so they can grieve.
The worst part is being just that bit too late, and missing out on being able to save the person, he says.
“We’d stay searching for long after we’re told to stand down, because most of the guys here would know – we’ve lost people.
“You have to do all the bits and pieces, all this craic,” he says, gesturing to the whiteboard behind him with a list of crew duties and assessments beside an array of green and red pins, “but at the end of the day, if somebody’s in trouble, just get up and go. Do it the old-fashioned way.”
Kehoe tries to hold his crew together for a while after some of the more difficult callouts, “just to make sure everybody’s all right, so that somebody doesn’t sneak off home and you know it’s playing on their mind”, he says.
“Picking up bodies that have been in the water for a while, it can affect some people.”
And the post can be hard no matter where you are stationed.
In Crosshaven, Co Cork, Aidan O’Connor is no stranger to being a first responder, working as an airport police firefighter at Cork Airport and having been at the helm at Crosshaven RNLI since the station opened in 2000.
He was awarded a framed letter of appreciation from the RNLI in recognition of his work rescuing a surfer in October 2005.
“It was quite rough, we had a 4m swell way out Roches Point so we had the wind against the tide, the tide was going out and the wind was from the south, so it gets very choppy,” O’Connor says.
“We got into the surf, I had to make the decision to get to the surfer who couldn’t swim or move, we had to drag him on to the boat, and we had to go into the surf to get him. We didn’t have time to throw down the anchor to veer back down.
“The casualty was getting hypothermic, it was a split-second decision to go in and get them, and they were okay. We even managed to save the surfboard,” O’Connor recalls.
Another time, when a lone sailor’s boat had to be towed, the rescued man hugged O’Connor and made him sandwiches when he was brought on board.
But not all callouts have such happy endings.
O’Connor was on the boat for three tragedies in the harbour last year, and the station attended to two drowning victims.
“The water is neither friend nor foe, and you have to be wary all the time,” he says.
But O’Connor stresses the importance of discussing the difficult callouts, and acknowledging that they were hard.
[ Watch: ‘It's the ultimate teamwork’ - Eithne Davis at the RNLI helmOpens in new window ]
“It does hit home when you’re out there, especially. No one wants to go home until it’s resolved. It’s grand to say, ‘there’s a maximum on the boat’, but there’s not, if we’re looking for someone, we will stay as long as we can,” he says.
If they can save someone, they will, and if they cannot, then they will do their absolute best to take that person home. And even though they receive no monetary payments for their work, knowing they made a difference is rewarding enough.
“Everybody sees it differently. There’s no one hard enough to say, ‘No, it doesn’t affect me’. Of course it does, it must, you’re not human if it doesn’t.”
“We give 100 per cent and we don’t stop giving that 100 per cent until it’s finished, take them home, and that’s very important for me, to bring someone home. If you can bring them home and they’re talking, obviously all the better, but the main thing is to bring someone home,” O’Connor says.
When O’Connor’s crew are coming back from a particularly difficult callout, the pagers are set off again. Instead of a LAUNCH alert, it says CREW ASSEMBLE, to get extra members down to support those coming off the lifeboat. The extra crew may also clean the lifeboat so the members who took part in the callout do not have to.
There is often tea and biscuits, and maybe a bag of chips.
The station’s Lifeboat Operations Manager (LOM) is another voluntary role with responsibilities for everything from the running of the station to stocking the fridge with milk and miscellaneous necessities.
Portaferry, Co Down’s lifeboat station LOM is Heather Kennedy. She makes sure crew training takes place and that the boats are in good working order, among many other things.
“If they’ve been out on a call that they’d known the victim, or the outcome hasn’t been so good or it’s been particularly stressful, I would be in touch with lifeboat headquarters who would then put in place this means of support for both the crew and anyone involved in the station,” Kennedy says.
“I’d say there are quite strict protocols about what we have to do if someone does know someone involved in an incident, and just being there to support them. If you have a good team, everybody looks out for each other,” Kennedy says.
If the LOM is made aware of what the callout is before the boat goes out, she would brief them as fully as she can, and if anybody wanted to stand down, she would give them an opportunity to do so, “and that is never a problem”.
In 2022, the RNLI had 1,061 launches from lifeboat stations across the State and Northern Ireland. Its volunteers aided 1,387 people and saved 30 lives.
And after all the callouts, the volunteers go back to their daily lives. Until the pager goes off again.
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