Portland Coastguard, this is Swanage calling.....

Some of the team went down to Portland Coastguard MRCC (the "ops room") this evening to get to meet our colleagues, put faces to voices heard over the radio and importantly to get an understanding of what goes on in the ops room when there's an incident in progress.

We saw how calls come in, how our teams are tasked, how to predict the location of a drifting vessel and we also had a look at the AIS system - a real time display charting the position, direction and speed of any ship in a given area. By drilling down further the operator can get details such as type of vessel, home port etc and we took a closer look at a couple of ships including the Condor ferry making its way back to Weymouth and a strangely named cargo vessel somewhere off Lyme Bay.

Our thanks go to the good people of C Watch for showing us around.

Oh, and Oz got to have a go on the computer....