Qualla: Clifden Lifeboat Station

Clifden Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Drow69, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk down The Quay in Clifden on a winter morning and you can see the lifeboat house with its slipway angling down toward the Owenglin River where it meets Clifden Bay. Inside, the 13-43 St Christopher sits ready - a Shannon-class all-weather lifeboat, 2.4 million euros' worth of orange-and-blue Atlantic muscle, with ten thousand engraved names threaded through the digits of its hull number. Each name represents a donor or a remembered loved one. The boat has been on this station since 2022. It is the latest answer to a problem the Atlantic has been posing on this coast for at least two centuries: when the storms come and a vessel goes down, who goes out to bring back the crew?

Read more: Clifden Lifeboat Station on Qualla

Image: Drow69 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Clifden Lifeboat Station: Charles Mills, March 1847

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geof Sheppard, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 20 March 1847, in the worst year of the Great Famine, the brig Halifax was driven ashore from her anchorage in Ardbear Bay just south of Clifden. She was on passage from Peru to Cork with a master and sixteen crew. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution did not yet exist in i...

Read more: Clifden Lifeboat Station on Qualla

Image: Geof Sheppard | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clifden Lifeboat Station: 1988: A Single Inflatable

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The RNLI placed its first lifeboat at Clifden on 15 March 1988, on a one-year evaluation period. It was an Atlantic 21 - a development of the rigid-inflatable design first introduced in 1963, but with two engines giving a higher top speed. The boat was towed on a trailer by the s...

Read more: Clifden Lifeboat Station on Qualla

Image: Bob Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clifden Lifeboat Station: The All-Weather Decision

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JoachimKohler-HB, CC BY-SA 4.0. The waters off Clifden are some of the most exposed on the Irish west coast. The Atlantic comes in unbroken from Newfoundland. The seas between the mainland and the offshore islands - Inishbofin, Inishshark, Inishturk South, Omey - are strewn with submerged rocks and tide races. ...

Read more: Clifden Lifeboat Station on Qualla

Image: JoachimKohler-HB | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clifden Lifeboat Station: Ten Thousand Names

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The permanent all-weather lifeboat arrived on 15 May 2022. Even on its passage to Ireland it took its first call - escorting a fishing vessel into Newlyn after responding to a coastguard alert. It had been funded in two parts. The first was the legacy of a man named Christopher H...

Read more: Clifden Lifeboat Station on Qualla

Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0