AMBULANCE CALL WHEN on 16th January, 1972, a Russian fish factory ship, anchored 30 miles west of Guernsey, requested assistance to take off a sick man requiring hospital treatment, the St. Peter Port, Guernsey, life-boat went out.

At 5.30 a.m. the life-boat The Princess Royal (Civil Service No. 7), on temporary duty at the station, slipped her moorings in astrongsoutherly gale and a very rough sea. It was two hours to high water. With a doctor and two St. John Ambulance Brigade members on board, the life-boat met the fish factory vessel Robert Eykhe 12 miles north west of St. Peter Port.

At 6.50 a.m. the life-boat went alongside the vessel but it was evident that the Russians did not want anybody to go aboard. The sick man, suffering from peritonitis, was strapped in a stretcher and lowered on a pallet by the ship's derrick. There was a rise and fall in the tide of about 10 feet but the stretcher was taken off the pallet and put in the life-boat cockpit.

The doctor was then hoisted by the pallet to the Russian vessel for a short talk with the ship's woman doctor. Afterwards the life-boat sailed for St. Sampson's where the sick man wastaken by ambulance to hospital. She returned to her station at 7.10 p.m..