MOA Rescue, a 6.8m Naiad RIB, was dedicated to the service of Coastguard Lake Brunner on Saturday. The ceremony was attended by local MP Chris Auchinvole, Mayor Tony Kokshoorn of Grey District Council, members of Coastguard Canterbury, West Coast & Lake Brunner and local supporters.

Owned by Coastguard New Zealand the rescue vessel has been provided under a bailment agreement for three years.  Coastguard Canterbury donated their 4WD vehicle which has been altered to work with the launch trailer.  This vessel is now available to be towed to any appropriate waterway on the West Coast.  It has already seen service in May when the volunteer crew of Coastguard Lake Brunner were involved in the recovery of a woman’s body in a local lake.

At last after 12 months of fundraising, planning and hard work Coastguard Clyde volunteers are nearly ready to move into their ‘shed’.  The new building will provide shelter for their Coastguard Rescue Vessel and safety equipment as well as a incident management room housing communications and other equipment for the management of search and rescue operations.

Coastguard is grateful for the support of NZCT, Pub Charity and the Otago Community Trust for funding for the project.

6th August at 11.20 a head on car crash on a road running close to the shores of Lake Wakatipu caused one car to travel over a bank finally stop 30 meters from the lake edge.  Police were unable to locate the driver and called out Coastguard Queenstown to search along the lake shore using their Thermal imaging equipment as there was a possibility he may have ended up in the lake or in bush close to shore.

The volunteer crew searched for two hours along the shore and out into the lake for a 1/4 mile out from shore but were unable to locate the missing man.  Police later discovered he hade made his way home and was safe and well.

Starting Friday 30^th July at 6pm with the report of ‘missing  surfers’ a full scale search and rescue exercise was held in Christchurch involving four Coastguard units (Canterbury, Waimakariri-Ashley, Sumner and Canterbury Air Patrol) as well as Police, LandSAR and Surf Lifesaving.  “The object of the exercise was to enhance our multi agency coordination and provide our people with the opportunity to practice their incident management skills” says Mark Whitehouse, Southern Region Operations Manager.  Mark said that in order to create a similar sense of urgency and pressure for the volunteers involved the exercise included multiple scenarios.  For example while still searching for two missing surfers on the Friday night a ‘Pan Pan’ call was received from a boat in distress, but only the boats VHF radio number was heard.  A ‘Pan Pan’ is a distress call indicating a vessel has a very urgent message regarding safety to a boat or person.  The three Coastguard vessels involved were out searching until 10.30pm that night and found all the targets.

Saturday morning at 7am another call for a missing surfer, 9am a report of missing school children on Quail Island and 9.30am a call relating to a crashed Hang Glider on cliffs outside Lyttelton Harbour.  And in the middle of this Coastguard Canterbury received a ‘No Duff’ call for assistance from a pleasure boat that had broken down in Lyttelton Harbour.  During the exercise radio messages were generally started with the message ‘SAREX SAREX’ to identify then, however when Coastguard receives a genuine call during an exercise to make sure everyone knows this is not part of the exercise the radio messages start with ‘No Duff, No Duff’.

“We’re really pleased with how our professional volunteers performed during the search and rescue exercise” says Mark, “its shown us again our strengths in operational activities and allowed us to identify areas in the management of operations that we need to put time into training on”.

Over 120 people participated in the exercise including Sea Cadets, members of the Canterbury Outboard Boat Club as well as Coastguard, Surf Lifesaving, LandSAR and Police.

Coastguard Queenstown was called out on Sunday 1st August when a member of the public reported a flare sighting on Lake Wakatipu near Fern Hill.   Queenstown Airport Rescue, with three volunteer crew aboard,was launched at 22.39 hrs (10.39pm) and began a shoreline search.  Eventually it was ascertained by the Harbourmaster and Police that the sighting had been of a floating Chinese lantern and the search was called off at 00.10hrs (12.10am)