News Archive
Lough Erne RNLI - Open Day
LOUGH ERNE RNLI OPEN DAY – SATURDAY 2 July 2005
Lough Erne RNLI Open Day is an invitation to meet the local team of RNLI volunteer crew, men and women, who are ever on call and ready to go quickly anywhere on the lakes in one of the two RNLI rescue craft now on Upper and Lower Lough Erne. The fifth Open Day is on Saturday 2 July, from 1.00 to 4.00 pm at the Lough Erne Yacht Club site, near the Manor House Hotel, followed at 7.00 pm by a meal, before a talk and film on sailing history in the LEYC Clubhouse.
RNLI volunteers work closely with the main statutory rescue services, including the Ambulance Service, the Marine and Coastguard Agency and the Fire and Rescue Services. On a great afternoon for a family outing, simulations will include a helicopter rescue from the water and a rescue from a crashed motor vehicle - provided that these services are not called away to a real rescue. Visitors will also be welcome to see inside one of the busiest RNLI stations in Northern Ireland.
Other features will include security advice for boat owners and an opportunity to hand in out of date marine flares for safe disposal by the Marine and Coastguard Agency. The RNLI Station is on the site of Ireland’s oldest yacht racing club, Lough Erne Yacht Club. Visitors will also see some of the historic Fairy racing keelboats with their original Edwardian gunter-lug sailing rig, one of which was recently rescued from sinking by the RNLI and Fire and Rescue Service working together.
The Fairies were built in 1906 and started their 100th racing season on Lough Erne in June. Yacht club members will be there with boats alongside LEYC jetty to take visitors, children and adults, for a sail in J/24s and other modern keelboats.
Today’s LEYC site was RAF Killadeas in the second world war. The RNLI Station is built where flying boats fighting submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic were hauled ashore to be serviced. The RNLI lifeboat is launched down the wartime slipway, and sailing boats in the bay are anchored to moorings first made for wartime Sunderland and Catalina flying boats.
On Saturday evening, all are welcome to join RNLI volunteers and LEYC members in the Clubhouse for a meal and a talk on the history of Erne Sailing focused on the 1980s and on a television programme made by the BBC about the Autumn Regatta. This film features a Fermanagh man who invented RNLI equipment 120 years ago, and the historic Fairy keelboats and J/24s still sailing at LEYC. It should be fun to see how today’s mature sailors looked twenty years ago.
The picture shows Lough Erne’s RNLI volunteers ready to welcome Open Day visitors on Saturday 2 July: Photo Peter Scott.