Lifeboat! Read Online Free

cleaners were too busy, their heads down searching for broken glass and sharp tin cans. The beach life-guards had yet to come on duty and no one amongst the smattering of tiny figures on the wide expanse of beach took any notice of the two small boys intent upon their own game: not the man with his metal-detector, nor the woman walking her dog, nor the two other children constructing a dam.
    By the time Nigel and Martin Milner reached the shallows they were obscured by the lingering wisps of morning sea-mist, hidden from the watchful eye of their parents—had their parents been awake to be watchful—and out of sight of the vigilant coastguard. They were alone in a make-believe world of their own creation with only the enticing whisper of the sea to lure them on.
    They played for some time in the shallows, bouncing in and out of the dinghy, carried to and fro by the waves running up the beach and then receding. They pretended to launch their dinghy—just like they had seen the lifeboatmen do. Martin already aboard, Nigel pushed the dinghy out beyond the breakers and flung himself into the craft. Bobbing and drifting, they played their game, confident that the waves breaking on to the sand would carry them back to the beach.
    They did not realise that though the surf carried them towards the sand, each time the ebb pulled them a few inches further and further out to sea.
    They could not have chosen a more dangerous set of circumstances. The time— two hours and thirteen minutes after high water—was the very point when the ebb was at its strongest. The patchy morning mist hid them from the view of anyone on the beach or promenade. To make matters worse, a light, offshore breeze began, gently at first and then with increasing strength, blowing away the mist but pushing the dinghy further and further out to sea …
    The time was 09.55.

Chapter Three
    Saltershaven was a seaside holiday resort on the Lincolnshire coast. Its resident population of twenty-three thousand could be more than trebled during the summer months. The hotels, guest-houses and holiday flats which lined the promenades along the sea front and many of the roads leading from the town to the foreshore; the chalets, the caravans and tents—all catered for over twenty thousand people staying in the town at the height of the holiday Season.
    The words ‘The Season’ were as familiar to the residents of Saltershaven as they had once been to the Society World of London in a bygone era—but with a very different meaning. For those directly involved with the holiday trade, the Season meant a long day often beginning before dawn and certainly never ending before dusk. The cafés, the cinema and theatres, the snack-bars, the gift-shops, the amusement arcades; the foreshore with its putting-greens, bowling-greens, kiddies’ corner, boating-lake, and paddling-pools; the swimming-pool with its chalets; all catered not only for the visitors who came to stay for a week or two, but for the thirty thousand or more people who visited the resort daily by car, coach or rail. All needed to be catered for—to be fed, to be entertained and sometimes to be protected in an unfamiliar environment. The city child let loose on a wide expanse of beach with an endless supply of sand and water at his disposal was vulnerable.
    Innocence and ignorance—the two ingredients most calculated to court disaster.
    At the moment when the Milner boys’ inflatable began to be pulled away from the shore by the ebbing current off the central beach at Saltershaven, seven nautical miles away the Mary Martha Clamp reached the area between the Inner Dog’s Head sandbank and the coastal marshland of Dolan’s Sand at the northern end of the St Botolphs Deeps. Coxswain Macready throttled back from full speed of eight and a half knots to a cruising speed of about six and a half, and began the methodical zigzagging pattern of reconnaissance.
    Macready