Well, what fun. Saturday was the SGM of SARDA South Wales, where we cleared up a few isues with regards to voting which had been brought up following a recent AGM. Mal and I were suitably hungover for most of the day following the wonders of Senghenydd’s welcome. Saturday night was Richard’s stag night – Rich is the training office for the Mountain Rescue team and has recently been ensnared by a nice Aussie lady.

The stagnight was a great laugh, Rich was fairly legless, although bearing in mind the amount of abuse he was getting both from us doing random things like spinning him around in a circle on the dancefloor and the amount of alcohol he was drinking (including the usual top shelf), he was holding up quite well. In fact, everything was going hunky dory until about midnight at which point I saw Mark Moran playing with his pager. Thought process was “What’s he doing? Oh, stop playing with it! Oh. Wait. Shit.” Mark’s actually an incident commander (IC) on our team and so gets the inital messages from the Police and whoever else calls us. The message read that we had a search for a despondent on the Gower, immediate response. While Mark was texting the IC to tell him that we were all drunk and unable to attend, Callum (a SARDA dog handler) got a message putting him on standby for 0700. So after a quick discussion, we decided that Mal and I should accompany Callum back to his place immediately and sleep it off ready for an 0700 response, so that we had 2 SARDA navigators for the dogs should we be needed. Everyone else carried on for a bit, but Mal and I were reasonably sober since we were still feeling a little fragile from the night before. Callum’s wife, Jane got permission from her sargeant to give us a lift home and so on my first night out in Newport, I went home in a police car. *big grin*

The outcome? Well, at about 0630, we had a standdown and a little later on this morning a message telling us that the body of the person had been found and that the incident was closed.

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