WONDERFUL LIFEBOAT

Taranaki Daily News, 24 July 1929, Page 16

WONDERFUL LIFEBOAT

GIFT FROM P. AND O. GROUP. COULD SAVE 300 IN ONE TRIP. The largest motor, lifeboat in the world has been built for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution by Messrs. S. E. Saunders. Ltd., at Cowes. She has been built out of the goft of £14,000 which the Peninsular and Oriental group of shipping companies has made, through Lord Inchcape, to the institution, in response to the Prince of Wales’ appeal last year. She is to be named Princess Marv and will be stationed at Padstow, Cornwall. This new lifeboat is sixty-one _ feet loner with fifteen feet beam, and is of two thicknesses of teak. She has fifteen main and 100 minor watertight compartments, and displaces forty-five tons of water. Her excess buoyancy will be equal to nearly one and a half times that 'weight, so that even if severely damaged, she will remain afloat and manageable. She will be driven by two 80-horse-power engines, which will continue to work even if entirely submerged, provided the air inlets are above water. Not only are the engines in watertight compartmets but they are themselves watertight. These engines will give the boat a speed of between nine and ten knots, with a reserve of power which will enable her to travel at full speed under practically any conditions of weather.

The boat has two cabins with accommodation for between fifty and sixty people, and in a calm sea vcould take 300 people on deck. Under the worst weather conditions she could carry 150 people in additions to her cre-w. She carries 500 gallons of petrol, which at a cruising speed of eight knots gives a range of 500 miles. She is fitted with jets in all compartments, by which an outbreak of fire can be smothered by foam, and has oilsprays in her bows for spraying on heavy seas. She carries a line-throw-ing gun with a range of 80 yards, is lit by electricity drive windless, and a lifeby electricity, and has an electric searchlight, an electrically driven windlass, and a lifesaving net into which the shipwrecked can jump as the lifeboat lies along their vessel. Since 1824 the Royal National Lifeboat Institute had saved 61,000 lives, about eleven lives per week, it was reported at the annual meeting held at Liverpool in April.