Lifeboat unable to make rescue

Press, 8 March 1982, Page 1

Lifeboat unable to make rescue

The Sumner Lifeboat Institution was powerless to help when a small boat got into difficulties on the Sumner bar yesterday morning. Just before 10 a.m. a number of Sumner residents telephoned the Christchurch police to report that, red flares had been fired from the craft, and that its three occupants. were standing up and waving their arms. Delays in repairs to its worm-eaten slipway at Scarborough meant that the insti- . tution could not launch the main Sumner lifeboat Rescue 111. The new jet rescue boat, the Marion McTeigue, the replacement for the ill-fated Aid 11, would have been ideally suited for the job, but she has yet to be delivered from the factory of C.W.F. Hamilton marine. To cap things off, the Sumner Surf Life-saving Club’s rescue vessel, which has served as a stand-in lifeboat recently, was away

for the national surf championships at Dunedin. The police had no option but to call in. the Waima-kariri-Ashley Lifeboat Association’s craft, which would have taken 25 minues or more to cover the distance between Kairaki and Sumner. The occupants of the boat were in no immediate danger, and the lifeboat institution managed to find a priv-

ate boat to go out and tow them in. It turned out that the craft had run out of petrol in choppy surf on the Sumner bar. A spokesman for the institution said that the Marion McTeigue would be ready to enter service “in a week or two,” and that according to the Christchurch City Council work on rebuilding the damaged slipway was expected to start this month.