SICK MAN TAKEN FROM ISLAND Islay, Inner Hebrides. At 11.50 on the morning of the 18th March, 1963, the medical officer for the Isle of Colonsay informed the honorary secretary that he had a patient suffering from a gastric perforation requiring immediate hospital treatment. The doctor had been in touch with the R.A.F. station at Leuchars to ask for a helicopter, but because of adverse weather conditions the helicopter could not operate. At 12.14 the life-boat Francis W. Wotherspoon of Paisley, put out in a northwesterly gale and a choppy sea. It was an hour and a half before low water.

The life-boat went to the Isle of Colonsay and embarked the sick man. He was conveyed to Port Askaig, where an ambulance was waiting to take him to Islay airport, and thence by aircraft to a Glasgow hospital. The life-boat reached her station at 3.45..