Hayling Island Lifeboat Station
| Inshore Lifeboats | |
|---|---|
| Launch Method | Carriage |
| Address | Bracklesham Road, Hayling Island, Hampshire, PO11 9SJ |
| Telephone | 02392 465641 |
Explore two centuries of RNLI lifeboat history, heroic rescues, and the enduring tradition of saving lives at sea.
At Sandy Point, where Chichester Harbour meets the eastern Solent, Hayling Island covers some of the busiest leisure water in the country — an estimated 10,000 boats in the Chichester area alone. One of the RNLI’s busiest inshore stations, it runs an Atlantic 85 and a D-class, and its story began with a gallant rescue off the Woolsiner shoals that so stirred the town it founded the station in 1865.
The need for a lifeboat here was proved dramatically in 1862, when the Portsmouth sloop Cygnet sank on the Woolsiner Sandbank and her three crew clung to the rigging for over five hours; Captain William Goldring and two others put off in a skiff and saved them, winning Silver Medals.
Three years later, in January 1865, the schooner Ocean was wrecked on the same shoal in a gale; after tugs and fishing boats failed, Major F. W. Festing and twelve fishermen launched a ten-oared cutter and brought off the crew, Festing receiving the Silver Medal. The rescue so stirred local feeling that a lifeboat station was established at Hayling Island that year, with a boathouse built for £250.
The station closed in 1924 when motor lifeboats were placed at Bembridge and Selsey. A rescue service was re-established locally in 1971, run jointly with the RNLI from 1975 and taken over entirely by the Institution in 1978. It is now a fast two-boat inshore station. Its position at the mouth of Chichester Harbour — where a fierce ebb pours out against the Solent swell to raise steep, breaking seas over the bar — makes this one of the busiest and most demanding inshore patches anywhere in the country, with much of the work falling in the summer sailing season.
