St Helens Marine Rescue's entry in the 2024 Volunteer Film Festival. Video by St Helens Marine Rescue (14/5/2024)
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 [Music plays]
00:23 (Dr. David Cooke) St Helens lives on the water.
00:25 Everyone here lives for the sea basically.
00:27 It's so much a matter of being a seaside resort that makes the marine rescue so important.
00:32 It's because we are based around George's Bay and we have the problems with the St Helens Barway.
00:37 (Dr. David Cooke) Barway is like a ridge of sand that stretches across the entrance of George's Bay
00:43 and depending on the tides and the weather conditions it can be extremely rough,
00:46 huge swells which break on the barway and if you're trying to come through there in a vessel
00:50 and you don't know what you're doing, well then it's a recipe for disaster.
00:53 A lot of vessels have come to grief, they've sunk, tragically also lives are being lost
00:58 because you have no control in a boat when you hit those treacherous conditions.
01:03 [Music plays]
01:05 The St Helens Barway has a history since 1890.
01:09 It has been there throughout that time and the records show that it behaves much the same today
01:16 as it did back in those years.
01:18 The barway shifts a lot and the deep water where we cross can be north or south in a week or two.
01:25 We have to go there quite regularly and check where the channels change to,
01:29 we have to keep taking soundings.
01:31 [Music plays]
01:33 St Helens Marine Rescue is made up of volunteers that are dedicated towards the health
01:38 and safety of people on our waters.
01:41 We start each day with VHF radio coverage in which we provide the weather forecast
01:46 and we also take messages from people out to sea, they log on with us to let us know where they are
01:52 and at the end of the day they log off.
01:54 A lot of sailors, a lot of boaties don't like crossing barways.
01:58 Boats need assistance to cross the bar, we do a service of escorts, recoveries, tows and that's all they need.
02:07 It's grown from a tiny little one or two person operation to now we have 45 members
02:14 of which 20 odd are very active participants in marine rescue.
02:19 A lot of our visitors to the area, they come by yacht, they come through that area that's theirs
02:24 so it's good that we can actually have something in place to look after those people when they get in trouble.
02:30 When you go on the water there are dangers and we are there to provide for the safety of those people
02:35 in the case of an emergency.
02:37 So there's a high degree of reliance upon our services, as a result there's a feeling of confidence
02:43 when people go on the water knowing that there is somebody there that can support them.
02:47 Bendigo Bank's contribution to our services enables us to buy those things that we can't necessarily afford.
03:01 We are a volunteer organisation, finance is a real issue for us.
03:05 Marine Rescue we felt was very deserving of the grant because they are vital to this community.
03:10 They've given us two community grants, the first of which we bought a parachute drogue, we also got a flying gaff.
03:17 We've supplied funds for a monitor for the cameras which are out in our barway so they help protect human life.
03:23 We can see what the conditions are like on the bar and that's a really important indicator to us here
03:29 because we're six nautical miles away from the barway.
03:32 We're very grateful to have a community bank which really looks after the community.
03:37 The distribution of the money into the community is done via community grants.
03:41 We have three grant rounds every year.
03:43 What we do is we basically ask the community groups if you have a need for funds to help your group
03:47 you can apply for funds through the community bank.
03:49 They've got to sell a lot of sausages to make $1,000 whereas if they apply for a grant here
03:53 well then they can get up to $1,000 in that grant.
03:56 In the short time that we've been open we've managed to put back in the community over $30,000.
04:01 We've only even scratched the surface, we're sort of getting our stride.
04:04 That's the strength of the community bank of course is that those profits come back to our company
04:08 which is distributed to the community.
04:10 It's really there to strengthen the local community by providing support.
04:13 [Music]
04:21 you
04:23 [BLANK_AUDIO]