The Aquila – lessons not learnt and DfT & MCA not listening!

29. March 2012 · 4 comments · Categories: Coastguards, CoastguardSOS, Common Sense, Environment, Government, Local Knowledge, MCA Cuts, SafetyAtSea

On the 20th July 2009 the Fishing Vessel MV Aquila capsized with the loss of three crew.

The Fatal Accident Inquiry by the Sherriff concluded that although there was nothing that could have prevented the tragedy, there were lessons to be learnt by Maritime Coastguard Agency (MCA) & HM Coastguard (HMCG) in respect of delays and mistakes that were made.

The report is here:  http://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/opinions/2012FAI22.html

However, here are some extremely relevant points from the report that have a significant bearing on the current HM Coastguard ‘Modernisation Plan’, which intends to close up to 50% of the current 18 Regional Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres (MRCC) & build a new National Maritime Operation Centre (MOC) to handle all 999 calls. Below is my assessment & summary of the report:

  1. There was initial doubt over the incident location due to duplicate place names even though the 999 caller gave precise location details.
  2. The original MRCC taking the 999 call & initiating the response assumed responsibility for the incident but then decided to pass to a nearer MRCC.
  3. The original MRCC failed to follow through with vital information when handing over to another MRCC.
  4. Mayday protocol was broken which failed to ensure all vessels in the area were properly advised & therefore respond immediately.
  5. The staffing levels at the nearest MRCC were inadequate.
  6. The experience & training of staff at the nearest MRCC were inadequate.
  7. MRCC staff were overstretched & unable to fulfil the requirement of a Search Plan.
  8. Senior HM Coastguard & MCA managers failed to support MRCC staff by allowing inadequacies and then further compounded this by showing little support to staff at the Inquest & subsequent revision of procedures/infrastructure.
  9. There are known areas of poor VHF Radio cover for Mayday communications.

Conclusions:

The MOC is destined to be a Call Centre of handlers with NO Coastguard experience due to insufficient staff (see Straight from the Horse’s Mouth blog), how any 999 operator can ensure proper incident location identification is impossible to comprehend, even when given accurate information as in (1).

The current modernisation plan requires frequent passing of incidents from MOC to MRCC with local knowledge or specialism in incident type, which according to the Inquiry recommendation should not happen, as mistakes are made as in (2 & 3).

The current modernisation plan requires remaining MRCC’s to double or quadruple the responsible areas that they have to deal with, which in turn will have a similar increase in workload. Given that some stations are already understaffed & poorly trained as in (5 & 6) poor decision making and mistakes are for more likely as in (3 & 4).

MCA & HMCG hierarchy /culture is failing to address the needs of staff with little evidence of embracing an improvement in relationships, staffing, training or procedures.(8)

The acceptance of poor radio coverage around the UK is intolerable with existing 18 MRCC’s but with half that number is downright dangerous, especially as the modernisation plan will be extremely reliant on remote monitoring. Eradication of Radio black spots needs to be a high priority.

There were some mistakes made by HM Coastguard in their handling of the MV Aquila tragedy, but the real problem here is that the Inquiry has made recommendation and points that are being ignored in the Modernisation  Plan.

How big a tragedy will it take before DfT & MCA listen to the Judicial System?

Currently DfT & MCA are failing to listen to Maritime Safety Experts, their own Coastguards, Industry, some rescue crews and the Public.

What will it take for this modernisation plan to be stopped?

Formal finding recommendations of the Sherriff:

In terms of Section 6(1)(e) of the Act there are other factors which are relevant to the circumstances of the death.

(i)                  The Air Rescue Co-ordination Centre (ARCC) should be responsible for the tasking of all Search and Rescue (SAR) helicopters. This will avoid the confusion, and subsequent delay resultant from that, caused by tasking of SAR helicopters by individual Coastguard stations.

(ii)                The Co-ordination and control of live incidents should be retained by the Initial Action Station. If transfer is appropriate for whatever reason, that transfer should be conducted following upon a full assessment of the location of the incident, the VHF radio coverage in the area of the incident and the staffing levels and capability in the respective stations. The Initial Station should retain control until all such checks have been carried out and it is agreed fully with the transfer station that they are prepared to accept the transfer. Any verbal transfer of co-ordination must be followed up as soon as possible with written confirmation of the transfer including full details of the incident and full reasons why the transfer is appropriate.

(iii)               The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) should review their training procedures to ensure that sufficient training is provided to watch managers and those who might act up as watch managers in Staff Planning and Risk Evaluation.

(iv)              Training is required to be given by the MCA to coastguard watch managers and officers in regard to the timing of the broadcast of Mayday relay signals, the circumstances in which such signals should be repeated and the circumstances in which a Mayday Silence should be broadcast.

 

From the horse’s mouth

22. March 2012 · 12 comments · Categories: Coastguards, CoastguardSOS, Common Sense, Environment, Local Knowledge, MCA Cuts, SafetyAtSea

The following blog has been submitted for inclusion by a serving Coastguard Officer despite Ministers issuing a gagging order last year. The Coastguard SOS campaign team is determined to report the truth and reality of the plans to close 50% of UK Coastguard rescue coordination centres and therefore feels that it is appropriate that the views of serving officers should be made public in order to counter the one sided argument put forward by Ministers. It is not pretty but the business of HM Coastguard very rarely is. These are personal words as they were received but the identity will remain anonymous in order to protect the Coastguard.

From the horse’s mouth

“The importance of our seas has not changed in two centuries. Shipping remains vital to our economy with 95% of our trade by weight carried by sea. But the way that we use our seas and shores has changed, presenting new problems and challenges.

Our seas are becoming more congested. The volume of shipping is increasing in many areas. Large numbers of Offshore Renewable Energy Installations are being developed around our coasts restricting the areas available to shipping.

Our coastline is getting busier. The UK has more than 20,000 miles of outstandingly beautiful coastline. Today millions of people use our seas, coasts and beaches for an increasingly wide variety of recreational purposes, often in areas that are also well used by commercial shipping”  UK Shipping Minister; Mike Penning MP. Nov 2011

When the Shipping Minister, Mike Penning MP, rose in Parliament on 22nd November 2011 to deliver his speech on “Coastguard Modernisation”, nobody was prepared for what was announced. Within two minutes of him starting to speak, or more accurately mumble and not even look up once from his notes, it was blatantly obvious to one and all that the decisions taken were Political and definitely not Operational. The fact that politicians had been meddling in things was plain for all to see and hear. Indeed, Sir Alan Massey when given a copy of the announcement, prior to it being delivered in the House, requested Mr Penning three times to clarify that he intended to close Liverpool MRCC and keep Holyhead MRCC open. It was not what the Maritime & Coastguard Agency (MCA) had been expecting and caused them to rapidly rethink their strategy for the future of the Coastguard Service.

When the first consultation closed, the Lib Dem Party Whip Mr Alistair Carmichael MP, marched into David Cameron’s office, banged the table and stated “I and the party will not support this plan unless you instruct the Shipping Minister to keep both Shetland and Stornoway stations open!” Guess what happened. The same thing happened when the Conservative Party Whip did the same and demanded that Milford Haven be kept open at the expense of Swansea. The complete and utter nonsense about DVLA in Swansea was just a smoke screen to hide the truth. Similarly, Albert Owen MP played the Welsh Language card and familiarity with Welsh place names with Mr Penning and lo Holyhead remained open at the expense of Liverpool. The whole Coastguard Service found the Welsh Language excuse to be laughable at best but also realised there was nothing they could do about it. The International language of the sea is English, however once you sail into waters around Wales it apparently changes to Welsh! After all, someone on holiday from the Midlands would not have a familiarity with Welsh place names and therefore totally negates that argument. With the stroke of a pen, the Minister without thinking operationally, had consigned the entire west coast of mainland England and Scotland to have no Coastguard station at all between Holyhead in North Wales and Aberdeen on the East coast of Scotland. A completely insane and reprehensible decision which he will regret making and which is still being fought to this day.

The Minister stated in his announcement that he was “Modernising” H.M. Coastguard, so let us look at what he means by that. “Modernisation is needed to address the limited resilience of current rescue co-ordination arrangements which have changed little since the removal of the visual watch in the 1970’s” The Minister was indeed badly briefed when he made this statement. H.M. Coastguard has undergone many reorganisations and equipment upgrades since 1970, indeed the latest upgrade occurred in 2011 under the RER Project. This enabled any MRCC in the country to connect to two stations to the North of it and two stations to the South of it and take over their functions totally. In effect, the one thing that the Minister was demanding “Resilience” was already in place and functioning. Why was he not informed of this or did he ignore it completely? There is no new updated equipment being fitted to the MOC or MRCC’s, it will be exactly the same equipment that they use now and which has served them so well for so many years. All that has changed is that the software has been upgraded but the functionality and limitations remain.

Despite submissions from serving Coastguard Officers, Merchant Shipping Companies, Offshore Oil, Gas and Renewable Energy companies and a host of leisure organisations, the Minister ignored the submissions made and forged ahead with his plan. Stating that this was a genuine consultation and that all submissions were considered from whatever source was rather disingenuous of the Minister and proved that he wasn’t listening. He and his political colleagues had already made their minds up and to hell with the consequences. The plan in its current form makes no sense operationally and is foolhardy, if not downright dangerous to say the least. It is widely felt, amongst the professional Coastguard Officers that should this plan remain in its current state then lives will be lost. Such is the strength of feeling regarding the “Future of the Coastguard Plan” that as of today’s date (08th March 2012), H.M. Coastguard is 110 qualified coastguard officers down on the National complement with more leaving on a daily basis. The backup Maritime Operations Centre (MOC) at Dover, which also controls the Channel Navigational Information System (CNIS) and the Harwich Sunk VTS is down 11 officers.

The reasons officers have given for leaving the MCA, when asked by their peers, are given below and in no particular order of priority :

1. Fearful of the way the service is heading and don’t wish to be associated with it in the future.

2. Unable to or have no wish to relocate to the MOC in Fareham as it would be too costly to do so. Even a 10% rise in salary would give the majority of officers an extra £1700 per annum before tax. This is hardly enough to cover the huge differential in the cost of living.

3. Believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that the Chief Coastguard intends to run the whole thing from Fareham and close every CG station in the country.

4. Believe that the MCA is becoming over reliant on technology and the system will fail catastrophically taking everything with it. Despite genuine concerns raised by officers, they are not being listened to and therefore feel undervalued, of no consequence and just a number.

5. Have absolutely no wish whatsoever to be associated with the Future Coastguard project as we do not consider it safe nor operationally viable.

6. Totally fed up with the “Jobs for the Boys” culture that is rife in MCA Headquarters. Posts are being created on a daily basis and filled by cronies of Senior Managers. They are not being advertised so that officers on the coast, who may have the skills being asked for and are under threat, do not have a chance under “Fair and Open competition to apply.”

7. We had an excellent relationship between the Ops Room and the Sector Managers/Teams on the coast. Now a huge wedge has been driven between the two disciplines and we are not even allowed to talk to them anymore. They feel isolated and so do we.

8. There has been little or no leadership nor direction shown by Senior Coastguard Officers for a long time now. They have seemed content to sit in the “Ivory Tower”, build their empires and issue edicts without fully understanding what they are demanding. It was extremely rare, maybe one a year, to receive a visit from a Senior Manager to their teams on the coast.

9. Sir Alan Massey is a breath of fresh air however he has come too late for me to stay. If he could change the plan then maybe I would consider it but I can’t take the chance.

These are genuine reasons given by officers with a genuine concern for the future. However, the MCA is rapidly losing staff, not only from the stations closing, but even more worryingly, increasingly from stations that have been informed that they are remaining open! Operational Managers in the MRCC’s can see the dangers but HQ Senior Managers don’t seem to care. It is unclear how much, if anything the Minister is being told regarding this or whether he is being kept in the dark. There appears to be an ostrich like mentality prevalent amongst the HQ Senior Managers that staff will move to the MOC regardless. The only person fearful of the “People Factor” is Sir Alan Massey himself, who has expressed that concern from the very beginning. It is now becoming apparent that the penny is beginning to drop regarding staff but it is too late. The floodgates are open and qualified staff is either being poached by the Private Sector or actively seeking out alternative employment. I have yet to hear of one officer who is willing to move to Fareham from any MRCC and that includes the south coast stations. To say that the morale in H.M. Coastguard is at an all time low would be an understatement, it is rock bottom and although MRCC managers are doing their best to maintain staff morale it is a losing battle. As stated above, experienced staff is being lost at an alarming rate and indeed some MRCC’s are running watches with unqualified staff and severely undermanned but that will never reach the ears of the Minister!

The Minister when answering questions from colleagues in the House on completion of his statement, set great store by the fact that “Pairing activities occur regularly between stations all the time”. This statement is in fact not true and pairing does not happen regularly. Again the minister has either been badly briefed, not told the truth or even worse misled the House on purpose. If it was the case and stations did pair regularly, then why has MCA Headquarters Operations Staff felt the need to produce an Operational Note to order, not request but order, stations to conduct pairing activities on a regular basis. Is this a rearguard action as so much of this plan appears to be?

The whole plan appears to be based on the wishes of a few politicians in power and not based on the Operational need of the United Kingdom and the general public. H.M. Coastguard is 190 years old and was formed to serve the needs of the International Mariner and the general public when they get into trouble and require assistance. It is not a political football that can be kicked whichever way suits at the time just to save a few coppers. Following through with the entire plan will save every taxpayer in the country £0.01 per annum. Do you think that they will miss that, I certainly don’t but I do think that they will play merry hell with the powers that be if there is nobody there to co-ordinate their rescue when they are in trouble and lives are lost.

The management and staff in MRCC Belfast and MRCC Stornoway are already ringing the alarm bells in respect of the way that the size of their areas of responsibility will increase with the closure of MRCC Clyde. Belfast, who incidentally has the smallest area of responsibility in the UK, are worried because Clyde normally cover for them and backs them up, contrary to what the Minister announced in the House, but now they are going to have to cope with at least a 250% increase in their incident level and they are openly stating that they will not cope and are fearful.

Similarly, Stornoway who will take on the other half of Clyde’s’ area are making noises too. This will be the acid test of the system as Clyde must close this year due to the lease expiring. After the Donaldson report stated that “no MRCC should be given an area bigger than they can handle”, why is the MCA and the Govt totally ignoring it and forging ahead with this insanity? The money saved will be minimal if anything at all. In fact the MCA are going to the Treasury to ask for upwards of £10M to commence the savings. How can borrowing money be a saving or am I missing something?

Some observations :

1. After submissions were made to the Transport Select Committee during the consultation period by serving Coastguard Officers, certain Senior Managers in MCA Headquarters have made it very clear that they did not approve of this and have made the lives and career progression of those officers, one Senior Operational Officer in the Northwest in particular, very difficult indeed. This was despite assurances being given to the Chair of the TSC by the Minister that this would not occur.

2. Posts within the MCA are not being advertised under fair and open competition but being given to cronies of Senior Officers as a reward for getting “onboard” during the consultation process. Indeed, it is common knowledge throughout the service that the recently appointed “Head of Counter Pollution” in the MCA was given the interview questions and expected answers prior to his interview. Even worse, the person who gave him the information was an old friend and on the interview board!

3. The MOC, which is a Fire Control Centre is currently a money pit and has recently had to be fireproofed after HSE declared it unsafe and a fire trap! Despite what the Minister said in his statement in November, the lease has still not been signed and is not expected to be signed until April 2012. In fact, all staff who has visited the MOC is all reporting that there is a huge amount of repair work going on which is being dressed up as “Snagging!” The main talking point however is the coffee machine which cost £20K.

4. The MCA Press Office have been instructed to play down any and all incidents reported to them for wider distribution. This particularly applies to those stations earmarked for closure as they should not be seen to be valuable.

5. Partners in the Civil Resilience Community, especially those with coastal boundaries, are becoming increasingly alarmed at the lack of engagement of H.M. Coastguard in Local Resilience Fora. This is on direct instructions from MCA HQ and stems from a total lack of knowledge regarding these matters by Senior Officers. Local MRCC managers recognise the importance of LRF’s and are continuing to engage with them when possible.

6. A statement was made by a very Senior Manager to the media on the south coast that the MCA would soon be recruiting 60 call handlers to work in the MOC. I could have sworn that the Minister stated that the MOC would not be a call centre!

7. The HS2 Project was costed, at today’s rates, at £62 Billion. Adding £2M to the annual MCA budget would fund a decent salary increase for the staff. Bring the current industrial action (ongoing for four years) to an end and still achieve station closures. Forth/Clyde and Yarmouth have to close due their leases expiring which would leave fifteen stations. It’s a win/win for the Government but apparently not an option they wish to consider.

Things in the country, indeed around the world are changing rapidly and the plan announced by the minister should be dynamic and able to move with and respond to those events. Although not local to the area but having read so much about it in the media lately, let me take Liverpool as an example. Peel Ports are building a new river berth to accommodate Post Panamax ships which will increase ship sizes and cargoes. Liverpool City Council has won the right for cruises to start and finish in the city which will drastically increase the liner and passenger traffic in the district. Offshore Renewable Energy is becoming big business and Liverpool, more specifically Cammel Lairds Shipyard, is earmarked to become the hub for this business. New Oil and Gas production wells are being drilled in Liverpool Bay and Morecambe Bay with a new static production platform to be constructed and located in Liverpool Bay. The floating Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Terminal will be located off Fleetwood in Lancashire and will see one giant LNG Tanker per week visiting to discharge cargo. Blackpool receives upwards of 13M visitors a year with the English Lake District close behind with 8.5M visitors. These are all things that increase quite substantially the risk to life in the area that Liverpool MRCC covers, yet it has all been discarded on a whim. It may be worthy for the Shipping Minister to note that MRCC Liverpool has had a sizeable chunk of North Wales within its boundary for many years and has had no trouble in recognising, pronouncing or spelling Welsh Place Names! I am sure that the same could be said for other stations under threat around the country, but unless the Shipping Minister receives a good dose of common sense and changes his mind then H.M. Government may well find themselves in the dock charged with Corporate Manslaughter when people start to die as a result of this insane plan.

 

Tangled webs and white elephants

09. March 2012 · 7 comments · Categories: Coastguards, CoastguardSOS, Common Sense, Environment, Government, Local Knowledge, MCA Cuts, SafetyAtSea

We can exclusively reveal on Coastguard SOS that Parliament and the public are being misled. This campaign to save the Coastguard Stations has been driven by people with experience, who care deeply that flaws in the Government’s argument will cost lives.

Central to our campaign is the firmly held belief of current and former serving coastguard officers that local knowledge is critical to respond rapidly to cries for help. This is backed up by coastguard volunteers, serving RNLI crew and others, who live their lives by and on the sea around our coast.

The Transport Secretary has acknowledged the importance of local knowledge. Mike Penning has made the following statements in the House of Commons;

  • (Clyde) is already paired with Belfast. That happens today and has been the case for many years.
  • Belfast regularly covers the resilience for Clyde and has the local knowledge that is necessary.
  • (Walton-on-the-Naze) will close but the station that covers it on a regular basis will stay open (and) local knowledge will still be there …
  • The point of keeping one centre in a pair …. is to retain the local knowledge.

The problem is that most stations are not currently paired and so the Minister, Mike Penning, has misled Parliament when answering questions from Gemma Doyle (West Dumbartonshire), Louise Ellman (Liverpool Riverside), Paul Maynard (Blackpool North & Cleveleys), Bernard Jenkin (Harwich & North Essex), Iain McKenzie (Inverclyde), Katy Clark (North Ayrshire & Arran), Mark Durkan (Foyle) and Jim Shannon (Strangford). All these MPs would have thought, from Penning’s replies in the Commons (on 22nd November 2011), that pairing was routine, included all coastguard stations and had been in operation for years.  This is simply not true and the people at these stations would readily tell you so if they were not being ‘threatened’ to keep their mouths shut.

The question is, did the Minister deliberately lie to Parliament, or have the senior management of the Coastguard Service lied to the Minister?

If pairing had been a routine and regular occurrence for all stations, why do the notes of the CSM’s Maritime Meeting (on 25th January 2012) state;

 First step is to get all coastguard operators practised and confident with the current concept of operations for pairing at all locations. This should focus on …  specific activities such as routine monitoring of channel 16 or routine telephone calls to relieve load on paired MRCC.

It then goes on to say that once this is “achievable at all locations” work on the radio equipment replacement (RER) system can be considered.

At the meeting an official was given the task to “identify and develop standard formats for national procedures beginning with pairing operations”.

On the same day Parliament was misled, the Maritime Coastguard Agency (MCA) blueprint, upon which Mike Penning based his answers, was published. On page seven it makes the remarkable statement “Currently we depend entirely on the local knowledge of our volunteers for detailed information concerning the coastline and coastal water activities where they live.”  Here perhaps lies the truth; that the Minister and the senior coastguard management simply don’t recognise the local knowledge held by personnel in the local stations that are to close and assume the volunteers will provide it. The volunteers may well have detailed knowledge of each cove and cliff, but they are not the ones who are answering calls on channel 16 or through 999. This is when local knowledge is critical to quickly identify where a distressed caller is, when they can’t give a street name or a city landmark.

Let us remember all these calls will in future be taken at a national command centre, even more remote and removed than one of the pairs of local centres that will remain open. This command centre is currently a white elephant.  It was originally commissioned and constructed as the national command centre for the fire service. Thankfully, before it could be put into operation, it was recognised that you cannot effectively co-ordinate an emergency service from a national location. Now, one could possibly think that fire service resources can be directed from anywhere, so long as you have an infrastructure of roads, buildings with numbers and even post codes. If it wasn’t found to be possible for the fire service, imagine how someone receiving the call at the national command centre in Fareham, Hampshire, would deal with a caller caught in a storm, saying “Help please, I’m off the Norfolk coast and we hired a boat from a little place called Ren…”  The radio goes dead at this point.

The national command centre will co-ordinate the UK Search and Rescue region, covering some 1.25 million square nautical miles of sea and over 10.5 thousand nautical miles of coastline.

For more information, please contact:  Dennis O’Connor - 07818 038200 - pdmvc@hotmail.com

LATEST UPDATE

As of 09.30 hours this morning, we’ve had three responses.  Just three!  So who cares?

Iain McKenzie MP, Inverclyde

I should also point out for inclusion that I have written to the Prime Minister following my question to him last month at PMQ asking for his thoughts on reversing this decision, I await a response.

Mike McKenzie MSP

I fully support this campaign and have spoken twice in the Scottish Parliament on this issue.

Maria Eagle MP, Labour’s shadow Transport Secretary

The  decision to close nearly half of the UK‘s coastguard stations has nothing to do with improving safety along Britain’s coastline but is a direct consequence of the government cutting the transport budget too far and too fast. The proposals risk leaving our coastal communities without vital local knowledge that can make all the difference in an emergency as stations are forced to cover areas over which they have no previous experience, contrary to the claims of Ministers.

Thank you for caring, and being honest & transparent ~ there are good people out there.

 

A Thursday teaser!

08. March 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

Good morning on this tantalising Thursday ~ just wanted to let you know, the next post will be published tomorrow morning.

A preview of the post has been sent to MPs, the dailies and the TV. We have had one response so far and very positive it was too!

It will be interesting to see who responds and who cares.

Come back tomorrow to see Tangled webs and white elephants.

Princess Matilda and the Coastguard Stations

05. March 2012 · 4 comments · Categories: Coastguards, CoastguardSOS, Common Sense, Environment, Government, Local Knowledge, MCA Cuts, SafetyAtSea

The Voyages of The Princess Matilda, by Shane Spall, may never have been written if the MCA-Cuts had already gone ahead. Shane explains why here.

Coastguard SOS written by Shane Spall (16.02.2012)

My husband, actor, Timothy Spall and I have just spent the last 7 years getting to know our wonderful country. We have travelled over two thousand nautical miles on our sea-going Dutch barge, The Princess Matilda.  Last summer we finished our circumnavigation of the British Isles.  People ask us if we would do it again. The answer is a resounding no.

Plans are in place to close down many vital Coastguards Stations and this means many of our RNLI crews will be under even more duress. This is because they will not have the local back up they need, when they are called out to vessels in distress.

What Tim and I have discovered on our travels, is local mariners, be they coastguards, fishermen, or lifeboat crews, know their own particular patch like the back of their hands. They know the tidal rips, the overfalls, the hidden rocky outcrops, they also know the short cuts to get out to sea very quickly. Local knowledge is crucial, and if these stations are closed, it will be a matter of time before a major tragedy occurs.

The sea is a hard mistress, and as we tuned into to Channel 16, the ‘emergency channel’ on our VHF radio, we knew the local guys were out there. ‘Go to Channel 74′, they would say, for ‘routine traffic’. Routine traffic is monitored by the local guys, so when Tim spoke to Thames Coastguard, when we were dazzled by the lights on the Medway last year, it was the locals who knew exactly where we were.Thames is one of the stations that will be closed.

Find our more about The Voyages of The Princess Matilda, The adventure of a lifetime - Shane Spall
Published 1st March by Ebury Press, £11.99 pbk. Also available in ebook

‘Tim and I both understood we had done something really stupid. We had underestimated the danger involved in going out to sea. We had no radio, compass, life raft or flares. In other words, we were a couple of idiots.’
This is the story of Shane and Timothy and their Dutch barge, The Princess Matilda. After spending a summer on the Thames, they decide to head out to sea with only a road atlas and a vast amount of ignorance.
Throughout this wondrous journey, they share memories of childhood trips to the seaside, but also of more recent times. A decade before, Tim had been diagnosed with acute leukemia and was given only days to live. Shocked at how life can pass you by they decided that if and when Tim got better, they would buy a boat.
As Tim and Shane explore the coast from the Medway to Cornwall, eventually they start to wonder. Could they make it out of England altogether? Could Matilda make it to Wales?
The Voyages of the Princess Matilda tells two inextricably linked stories. The first, how Tim and Shane take charge of their new boat and attempt to sail her to Wales, and the second, of how Tim beat his life-threatening
illness. This book is very much about being alive and how important it is to have family, friends and loved ones around
us. An intimate journey of epic proportions, where Tim and Shane sail on to celebrate life, love, and living.
‘Shane and Tim Spall stand shoulder to shoulder in a sea adventure that’s funny, delightful, scary – and given their minimal knowledge of seafaring at the outset, occasionally beggars belief. It’s a laugh and cry book – I really loved it.’ JO BRAND
‘A beautifully crafted, moving and funny book, stuffed with adventure and massive, palpable love. I want to belong to the spall family NOW, please.’ DAWN FRENCH


Author biography
Shane Spall is from a large Midlands family. Her mother called her Number Five and her father after a character in a Western, played by Alan Ladd. As a teenager in the seventies she worked in a Quaker hotel in Birmingham and on her day off would sit in New Street station and wonder where everyone was going. She now knows they were mostly going to work or coming home. The day that the young actor Timothy Spall arrived at New Street in 1981 she was in a council flat a few miles away. They could have been ships that had passed in the night, but he sought her out because he had fallen passionately in love with her when he accidentally touched her arm one evening. The young actor now gets to play parts called ‘old man’ but is considered to be a ‘national treasure’. He’s a bit of a show off, but his wife doesn’t mind, she keeps his feet on the ground. They have three children and used to have a bulldog that couldn’t swim, and a goldfish but they fostered it out as it got lonely staying home on its own.
Follow Shane and Timothy Spall on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/pastafa
For more information, interviews or review copies please contact Sarah Bennie at Ebury
Tel: 020 7840 8755 or sbennie@randomhouse.co.uk

Amazon :  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Voyages-Princess-Matilda-Shane-Spall/dp/0091941806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330946659&sr=8-1

You can find out more with the fabulous BBC series, All At Sea that is currently showing on BBC4 at 20.30 on Tuesdays.

Posted by Lynne Gray