The first incident of the year began when the UK Coastguard received a partially garbled message from a 406mHz distress beacon. The position given in the message was about 5nm ESE from Swanage, so the Shannon class all-weather lifeboat was tasked to investigate.

The lifeboat and volunteer crew arrived at the location and nothing was visible, although frequent, weak, signals were heard on 121.5kHz – another frequency used by distress beacons.

The lifeboat began an ‘expanding square’ search pattern and was joined in the search by Coastguard Rescue Helicopter ‘R-175’. After an hour of searching, and with no signal received that was strong enough for direction-finding equipment to lock onto, the UK Coastguard were happy to stand down both the aircraft and lifeboat.

The lifeboat returned to its slipway at 12.44pm to be washed down, sanitised and re-fuelled.