Your not volunteers?

On the second incident today at Burlington Chine, we were approached by a lady asking what we were doing?

As is often the case, the lady was confused with the role of the Coastguard and the RNLI so Eric and I set about explaining who did what and how it all worked.

So your full time Coastguards.....er no we are volunteers just the like the RNLI crews, the difference being we are part of a Government Agency and of course the RNLI is a charity.
We think we just about convinced the lady we were volunteers but its difficult to explain with the Coastguard in the press at the moment. There are full time Coastguards (about 400) of them however the Coastguard Rescue Service is made up of 3500 Volunteers.

So as we walked back to the truck another member of the public asked us if that yacht had been caught smuggling or something.....Eric and I looked at each other and started explaining all over again.