Starting next week, a group of active Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), volunteers from Tower Lifeboat Station in London will embark on an eight-day, 540km bike ride to raise money for the charity, which saves lives at sea in the UK and Ireland.
It will take place from the charity’s headquarters in Poole to Lifeboat Pier in London, pedalling one kilometre for each life the crew has saved on the Thames since the station was established in 2002.
A core group of five or six cyclists will ride the entire route, visiting other lifeboat stations as they travel along England’s Southeast coast, via Cowes on the Isle of Wight, Littlehampton, Dungeness, Walmer and Whitstable, with additional riders joining the core group for single days. On the last leg, from Gravesend to London, the group are planning to cycle while wearing full gear.
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The original plan was for the volunteer lifesavers to wear visible gear for most of the ride, and to invite more people to join them on various legs, but after recent incidents of aggression towards members of the RNLI by anti-immigrant belligerents, additional risk assessments have been made to protect the safety of the participants.
“We’ve had some really lovely messages of support, but we’ve also had some horrific messages,” explains ride organiser Toni Scarr. “So we won’t be wearing any RNLI gear in various critical locations. We’re also looking at the timing of where we go past a few places as well. We may well need to change our route.”
Founded in 1824, and now operating 238 lifeboat stations and 240 beach-based lifeguard units around the UK and Ireland, the RNLI is a charity that is entirely reliant on donations to perform its service, which has seen volunteers save over 146,700 lives to date. Having just had a recent intake of new volunteers, the Tower RNLI riders are using the challenge to raise money to help with training and equipment costs.
Based on the River Thames, providing a 24-hour search-and-rescue service on one of Britain’s busiest waterways, Tower RNLI is currently the busiest lifeboat station in the entire country, with the crew responding to over 600 calls out from HM Coastguard every year. The goal of the ride is to raise £10,000 to help equip and train the new lifesavers so they are ready when the next emergency happens.
“The second of January next year is our 25th anniversary,” Tower RNLI volunteer and full-distance rider Nick Harding told Cycling Weekly. “We’ve been on 11,930 shouts in those 25 years, and 540 lives have been saved. When we started planning the ride, we were on 530, so the distance keeps getting a little bit longer.”
“Actually, it’s 541 lives saved now,” he adds, explaining about an incident the crew responded to last week. “If we need to throw in a couple of legs, or go around a park a few times [to make up the growing number], then we will, but we’ll see how we feel towards the end.”
Even before donning their rescue gear for the final leg, the group is likely to look a little different to the average group of riders. “We’re all using our own bikes,” Harding tells me. There’s quite a wide range – someone’s on a Brompton. I’m on a nice Cinelli gravel bike myself.”
Harding is a keen bikepacker, but the group will be very mixed, with some less experienced members. “We’re not doing massive daily distances, but we want to visit as many lifeboat stations on the way as we can. Our longest day is 49 miles and our shortest day is the last day from Gravesend, which is just under 30.”
Like all good ideas, the seed for this concept was planted during a conversation in a pub, during the Tower’s Christmas party last year. “I was chatting to Toni [Scarr], and she said, let’s do a group ride to mark the anniversary. By the end of the evening, she’d recruited half the crew to the cause. And this rides is what has transpired from that conversation.”
It transpires that Scarr has previous in this department. In 2014 she organised a Tower to Tours challenge that saw RNLI volunteers (in relay) run from London to Dover, swim the English Channel and then ride to the town of Tours in Centre-Val de Loire in France. So really, by comparison, this lot are getting off lightly.
“There’s just a lot and going on and we haven’t fundraised for a while,” Scarr tells me. “But we’ve also had a massive recruitment recently. last time it was similar, in that we needed to train a whole load of new people, but that was 10 years ago. So, it has come round to that focus again. And it sounded like fun.”
Support the Tower RNLI crew through their JustGiving fundraising page.
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