Idle engines and strikes

First, an apology. For those of you who hang on every word I write (yes, both of you), I apologise for not updating you. Things have been quiet recently. Well, no, not quiet – because I have been manically busy, especially at work where we have far more work than time. It’s just there’s not really been anything blogworthy going on. The new job is excellent (Hi, Simon) and I’m loving the work and the toys, even if one of my current jobs is going through a thoroughly boring piece of Ofcom documentation and summarising it so that I’m the only one that has to risk falling asleep in odd places because it’s so damn boring. Sean’s been staying down, which is another reason why i haven’t blogged – in the grand scheme of things, snuggling on the couch wins every time over playing on the laptop.

We’ve had two Mountain Rescue callouts since I blogged. The first I missed because I was away and that was a chap who fell on his ankle up near Rhayader. The second was last Friday and we got stood down en route and was some kind of request for help in finding a 4×4, again near Rhayader. So our Landrover’s haven’t moved much recently.

But against the backdrop of this weekend has been a rather controversial argument going on that the press seem to have missed, though they’ve been reporting parts of it. I am of course referring to the recent Coastguard strike much publicised on the BBC news site. How did we get involved?

On Thursday, we were asked by the various police forces if we would be prepared to respond to Coastguard callouts. Of course, the initial response is that we could, but a bit more thought put the brakes on things and a number of people have asked why.

The initial problem is our insurance, although it was fairly quickly ascertained that so long as we stuck to our training, and that we didn’t go into boats of more than 3m in length and that we were content with the risk involved – just as we asses the risk in every callout – we were covered. Then there was the question of morals – should we get involved and potentially undermine the position of the Coastguard? Would we appreciate them doing our job if we were on strike? But the final nail in the coffin that stopped us from responding was finding out that if we were to perform their duties we’d not be covered under our usual accident and disability policy, but rather under the MCGA’s. So, would we respond to calls covered by an insurance policy which was at the heart of the entire strike itself? In the end, the simple answer was “No”.

Finally, we’ve had a few calls with the Ambulance service whilst on First Responder duty recently. Nothing too exciting, although last night’s was good – a nice old lady’d fallen 2 steps up the stairs and hurt her wrist. Lovely woman, with a caring family. So nice to see people being looked after like that. Mal might blog a bit more about this one, as it was technically his first shout.

Oh and in other news, I’ve just bought a Garmin Foretrex 101, so I’m looking forward to going out and playing with that. Huzzah.