A shout starts with a 999 call, a Coastguard tasking and a page to the crew, and every step of it is recorded and audited. Eleven of ours came from a call the network has no record of receiving.
I am the launch authority at an inshore lifeboat station on the west coast, which means I am the person who says yes.
The chain matters, so here it is.
Somebody dials 999 and asks for the Coastguard. The call lands at an operations centre and is recorded. The watch officer takes the details, decides what to task, and pages the station.
The page comes to us as a text on the crew pagers with a position and a brief. I authorise the launch, the crew launch, and the boat goes.
Every step generates a record. The 999 call has a recording and a reference. The tasking has an incident number. The page has a timestamp. The launch is logged by us and by the Coastguard, and every shout is written up afterwards in a return that goes to head office and is audited.
That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is because a lifeboat launch puts seven volunteers into the sea and somebody has to be able to say why.
Eleven times since 2017 we have been paged to the same position and found nothing.
That on its own is not a story. A false alarm with good intent is the commonest shout there is: somebody sees a light, or a coat on a rock, and does the right thing by ringing, and the boat goes and finds a coat on a rock, and everybody is glad they rang.
Those are recorded as false alarm with good intent and they are about a third of what we do.
What makes these eleven different is that there is no call behind them.
The tasking exists. There is an incident number, a position, and a page timestamp, and the page went to our crew from the operations centre.
There is no 999 recording. There is no caller. The incident record's caller field is blank, and it is not a field that is allowed to be blank.
I found that out in 2019 because I asked, after the fourth one, and the watch manager was as puzzled as I was and went and looked for the recording himself and rang me back the next day to say there was not one.
He was clear about what he had checked. The recording system captures every call to the centre. There is no call at that time, from any number, and none in the ten minutes either side.
What the tasking says.
The position is the same every time to within a few hundred metres. It is about a mile and a half off, off the end of a reef that dries at low water, which is a place we know very well because it is where things actually happen.
The brief is the same words every time: person in the water, one, no lifejacket.
That is a specific brief. It is not what a watch officer would write from a vague report. It is what they write when a caller has told them there is one person, in the water, without a lifejacket, which is the worst thing you can be told and which is why the tasking is immediate.
What we find.
Nothing, eleven times.
We search properly. The boat goes, we search the position, we run an expanding square, and on four of the eleven a helicopter has come too because of the brief.
The times are the thing I keep coming back to. Nine of the eleven have been between 03:00 and 05:00.
I have been on the boat for seven of them. It is a cold, wet, pointless two hours in the dark and the crew do not complain, because the eighth one might not be pointless and everybody in a lifeboat crew understands that arithmetic.
What has been done about it, and this went further than I expected.
After the sixth one the Coastguard commissioned a technical investigation of their own incident system, because a tasking with no call is a serious thing in a system that is audited to the standard theirs is.
The investigation found no fault. It confirmed that the incident records were created at the operations centre, on the system, by a logged in watch officer, at the times stated.
That is what I had assumed until then and it is the sentence I have thought about most since.
Somebody sat at a desk and made an incident and paged us.
I have asked two of them.
Not accusingly. You cannot walk into an operations centre and accuse a watch officer of inventing a person in the water, and I would not, because I have worked with those people for nineteen years and they are as good as it gets.
The first one, in 2020, said she remembered it and that she had taken a call.
She described it: a woman's voice, quite calm, giving a position by reference to the reef, saying one person, in the water, no lifejacket. She said the line was poor and dropped before she got a number.
There is no call.
The second one, last year, said the same. A woman's voice. Calm. The reef. One person.
Neither of them knew about the other. I checked that carefully before I asked the second one, and I asked it in a way that gave nothing.
What I do now is authorise the launch.
That is the only possible answer and I want to be plain that it is not a difficult decision. A tasking arrives with that brief, at that position, and I say yes, and I will say yes to the twelfth one.
The crew know. Not from me: they have pagers and eleven is a number they can count.
Two years ago one of the older hands, who has been on that boat since before I was the launch authority, said something to me on the slipway after the tenth while we were washing the boat down.
He said his father had been on the crew, and that his father had told him there had always been shouts to that reef, and that the old man's rule was that you go, and you look, and you do not stay after the tide turns.
We have never stayed after the tide turns. I have checked the returns. Eleven for eleven, and not one of them a decision anybody made on purpose.