Heroes of the RNLI by Martyn R Beardsley;

Author:Martyn R Beardsley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / Georgian Era (1714-1837)
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

2 December 1966

Lieutenant Commander Harold Harvey, RNR, Inspector of Lifeboats for the north-west, paid a visit to the home in Holyhead of T. B. Roberts, the lifeboat station’s honorary secretary, only to find that he had just missed him – he was heading for the boathouse, having been informed that a Greek tanker of 1200 tons called Nafisporos was in trouble about twenty miles north of Point Lynas on the northern coast of Anglesey. A lifeboat from Douglas, Isle of Man, had been in search of her when she was in that vicinity, but had failed to find her. Because the storms had cut off the phone lines, Roberts had hurried to Holyhead to alert her coxswain. Harvey set off after him.

When he got to the station, the St Cybi, the Holyhead lifeboat,1 was just about to put out, and Harvey persuaded the coxswain, who was one man short of a full complement, to allow him to take his place among the crew when she launched in a Force 10 gale gusting to Force 11 (one stage short of a hurricane), at 10.30 am. Needless to say, visibility was poor and the going was rough in the extreme. After three hours, a Shackleton search and rescue aircraft that had been tracking the ship guided the St Cybi towards her.

Dic Evans and the Moelfre lifeboat Watkin Williams had been at sea all morning on another missions, but by early afternoon they were asked to join in the efforts to save the crew of the Nafisporos. A Russian ship had attempted to tow her to safety but the storm had reached hurricane proportions and the towing line had proved inadequate to the task. With darkness coming on much earlier because of the conditions, the Greek tanker was heading inexorably towards the north Anglesey coast, yawing dramatically.

The St Cybi gallantly closed on the vastly bigger Nafisporos, but as the tanker rolled over she crashed down onto the lifeboat, her giant propeller thrashing wildly just feet away from the lifeboat’s rudder post, and Thomas Alcock, her coxswain, had to withdraw his damaged vessel to a safe distance. Dic Evans in the William Watkins caught sight of the tanker’s outline in the twilight, and approached her from her stern. He was able to nudge against her side, but now saw that one of the Nafisporos’ own boats was hanging loosely from its davit after a failed attempt to launch it, and its uncontrolled swinging and twisting as the ship continued to roll from side to side posed a serious threat to his own boat. He had to abandon the attempt. When he came in a second time, no one on board the Nafisporos had the courage to make the big leap in conditions that were, after all, almost as extreme as it was possible to imagine.

Late in the afternoon, when darkness had set in, the St Cybi tried again. By now, Harvey, the lifeboat inspector, was at the helm since Alcock, her coxswain, needed to be with his crew on deck.

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