Qualla: Kinsale Lifeboat Station

Kinsale Lifeboat Station: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pl:Wikipedysta:A., CC BY 2.5. Read the name painted on the hull and you do not quite believe it. Miss Sally Anne (Baggy) II, Never Fear, Baggy's Here. Twelve words on a thirty-foot inflatable rescue boat, the longest name in the entire Royal National Lifeboat Institution fleet. The boat works out of Adams Quay in Kinsale, and behind the cheerful joke of its name is a woman who paid for it, the cancer she lived with, and the people she wanted saved when she could no longer save herself.

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Image: pl:Wikipedysta:A. | CC BY 2.5

Kinsale Lifeboat Station: Two Lifeboats, Two Centuries Apart

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Hawgood, CC BY-SA 2.0. A lifeboat first sat at Kinsale in 1818 and stopped operating in 1824. No log of services survives. After that the town went without an RNLI boat for nearly two centuries, even though medals continued to be awarded for rescues here. At four in the morning on 13 January 1826, the ...

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Image: David Hawgood | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kinsale Lifeboat Station: The Last Atlantic 75

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eileen Henderson, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2002 the RNLI announced that an inshore station would open at Kinsale. Volunteers trained at the Inshore Lifeboat Centre in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, and the first boat - Vera Skilton, B-705, one of the earliest Atlantic 75 hulls built in 1994 - arrived for service. The stat...

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Image: Eileen Henderson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kinsale Lifeboat Station: The Jump

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. At six in the evening on 10 April 2016, crew member Matthew Teehan saw helm Nick Searls running through Kinsale. Teehan would later say, you wouldn't often see Nicky running. The lifeboat was launched ten minutes later and was on scene in five more. The fishing trawler Sean Antho...

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Image: David Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kinsale Lifeboat Station: Sally Anne Odell

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Speckled Bird, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sally Anne Odell was born in Banstead, Surrey in 1936. She never married and had no children. When her father died, she inherited a sum she did not need to keep, so she went to the RNLI and asked how she could help. The institution offered her the chance to buy the last lifeboat ...

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Image: The Speckled Bird | CC BY-SA 4.0