DUNMORE EAST is a fishing port at the mouth of Waterford Harbour in southeastern Ireland, just off the busy shipping lanes leading from the Atlantic Ocean up St George's Channel and into the Irish Sea. The shore sweeps down to Hook Head on the opposite side of the river estuary and a dangerous tidal race there has given Dunmore more than its share of shipwrecks. After a heavy rainfall, fresh water pours down the river and pushes under the sea and at high tide with a southerly gale huge waves curl up, threatening to pull small boats underneath them and drive larger ones on to the rocks.

The lifeboat records tell their own story. Since the station was established in 1884 Dunmore East lifeboats have launched 209 times, rescuing 203 people.

The previous coxswain, Patrick 'Billy' Power, was awarded four bronze medals while the present coxswain, Stephen Whittle, holds a silver and two bronze medals.

As a boy, Stephen had gone fishing with his uncles. Money was scarce and fish helped to supplement the family income.

With no sophisticated equipment to find the fish, vital knowledge of sandy patches, shingle and rocks was passed down by the older men. The boys would get up very early to put in four hours' fishing before school and then be back in their boats for another six hours after school. The lifeboat held a fascination for them and Stephen remembers, when he was twelve, standing on the cliff tops watching the lifeboat escort to safety a steamer which had run out of coal; her crew were breaking up hatch boards to burn in her boilers.

Stephen left Dunmore to join the Merchant Navy and spent six years as a 'deep sea man'. Like most merchant sailors, he has dozens of stories from all over the world and he vividly remembers sailing up African rivers, deep into the jungle, to pick up cargoes of produce from local tribes. Returning to Dunmore, he took up fishing again and joined the lifeboat crew in 1959 as one of its most experienced seamen.

By 1964 Stephen had been appointed second coxswain and in March he won his first medal. The Dutch coaster Jan Brons ran aground in a south-westerly gale on Ardnamult Head, a mile northeast of the harbour. The lifeboat, with her boarding boat in tow, quickly reached the ship but Coxswain Billy Power realised he could not get alongside.

An attempt was made to use the boarding boat but the seas were too rough. The rocket line was fired and the breeches buoy gear rigged but because of the violent motion of the lifeboat it was decided to use the boarding boat to keep the veering lines spread out.

Stephen Whittle and John Power, the assistant mechanic, volunteered to man the boarding boat which was positioned halfway between the lifeboat and the ship. The crew of the freighter were foreign and did not understand how to use the breeches buoy, so the first man, instead of sitting in it, put it around his shoulders.

'When he got down into the surf he was spun around several times,' Stephen Whittle recalls. 'He was just on his last gasp when he got to us. We would have lost him that morning if there had been no boarding boat: he would have just dropped over and gone. We had a job to get him in. It's not easy to pull a fellow into an ordinary boat.' Luckily, the first man was able to explain to the rest of the crew how to use the breeches buoy and five more were successfully pulled to the boarding boat as she and the lifeboat were pitched andtossed in the backwash of surf from the cliffs. Bronze medals for seamanship and courage were awarded to Coxswain Patrick 'Billy' Power, Second Coxswain Stephen Whittle and Assistant Mechanic John Power.

The most difficult service Stephen can remember was in November 1970, when he had been coxswain for four years: 'That was a really vicious night. We damaged the lifeboat just driving into the sea, not by hitting the rocks, even though she was a good boat. It wasn't just an ordinary sea. It was really violent, with cross seas coming out of nowhere. I heard that a boat was about to drive on to Hook Head and I didn't hesitate. I came over to the harbour, went down aboard one of the boats, told the pilot station on RT, dropped the receiver and got away. We even went short-handed that night, taking a young lad to fill in the gap. He had been fishing all day and part of the night but we took him anyway. When we were on the way out the situation was getting so desperate that I said to the lads, "I'm going to turn sharp at the Hook. Hold on." At that particular moment we got a jolt from a sea and we fell sideways into it. We didn't realise at the time but we had damaged the bilge keel on the boat. As she toppled down and put her shoulder into the sea, she locked the air between the bilge keel and the hull and bent part of the bilge keel over. We didn't put out the drogue for the simple reason that we would have lost time. We actually ran half a mile oh one sea that night, which, without the drogue, was a bit frightening because we could have tipped over.' James Bates, coxswain of Kilmore lifeboat, was skipper of the fishing boat, Glenmalure, and when the fishermen saw the lifeboat's blue flashing light they fired three flares to give their position.

Glenmalure was only about 50 yards from the rocks and the crew had taken to their liferaft. The danger now was that trailing ropes and nets could foul the lifeboat's propellers and there was no room to go in around the boat to pick the men up while heading out to sea again, into the weather. Stephen had to go in head to the shore using only one engine; that way, if one propeller was fouled the other would still be free and the second engine, in reserve, could be brought into use. The lifeboat came alongside the liferaft and had snatched two men off before a sea swept the raft away. Quickly coming astern, the lifeboat chased the raft and the third man was saved.

Another fisherman had been swept away and the lifeboat searched for two hours, but without success. Shortly after the survivors were landed a message was received that a man had been spotted.

Another search was made but nothing was found.

Stephen Whittle was awarded the silver medal for this rescue.7 reckon that was the worst service that anybody in Dunmore has been out on.

There were really crazy seas that night. We wouldn't like to see them again, even in the new boat.' The new boat is a 44ft Waveney, St Patrick, which was paid for by a special appeal in Ireland and sent to Dunmore East in 1975. Previously, the station had Watson and Barnett class lifeboats which gave a maximum speed of 8 to 9 knots and the idea of a change to a totally different, faster boat was treated with caution.

'A few of the lads said it would not do at all. They couldn't get used to a boat like that. They thought she was so unstable at low speed. It is only when you get the hang of what a high-powered boat, like a Waveney, is capable of doing, and the way she can run ahead of the seas, that you suddenly change your mind. It is big step from the old lifeboats. If you see a big following sea, you can go ahead on one engine and astern on the other and actually turn to look right into the sea, which you didn't have a hope of doing in the old boats. The old ones sit there and just bear the brunt of it.' The increased speed of the Waveney changed the pattern of services at Dunmore and the lifeboat now receives calls to casualties much further out than before.

The crew are more comfortable with more shelter.

'In the old boats you perished alive when you were wet, with the oilskins round your throat. When you get soaked now you can go below and get dried down. You can have a hot drink, which was practically impossible in the old boat.

You had a primus, which was put in a - bucket and you lit it and hoped for the best. If it capsized you dumped the bucket and primus stove all over the side; it was the only safe thing to do. Today we have an electric geyser.' The type of casualty is changing, too, for there are now more yachts making the crossing from Land's End to Ireland.

One problem is that yachtsmen are worried that the lifeboat, coming alongside, will damage their boat. With skilful handling this can be avoided but, as the lifeboat rolls towards the yacht's top rail, the concern is quite understandable.

Another difficulty is the anxiety of parents about their children.

They often ask for them to be taken off when they might be better left on board while the lifeboat escorts the yacht to safety. Dunmore lifeboat gets her share of calls to the inexperienced and foolish, like the man who set off down the Waterford River in a dinghy in thick fog and capsized at the harbour entrance.

She also, on occasion, has been called out to help very competent yachtsmen caught out in extreme weather, as, for example, during the 1979 Fastnet Race.

Stephen was on leave at the time of the Fastnet storm, but his second coxswain, John Murphy, took the lifeboat to sea for over 16 hours, rescuing eight people, saving one yacht and escorting three others to safety.One characteristic which pervades Stephen's stories is a wry sense of humour. He was awarded the thanks of the Institution inscribed on vellum for the rescue of the crew of the motor vessel Michael on January 13, 1975.

Michael's engines had broken down and she was drifting towards the shore. She was rolling too heavily for the lifeboat to go alongside so her crew abandoned ship and got into the liferaft, but they did not cast off. As Stephen said, 'Shouting is not much good when it's blowing a force 11.' The problem aboard the liferaft, the lifeboat crew discovered later, was that the men had nothing with which to cut the painter; eventually they used a pair of nail scissors to hack through the rope, the liferaft drifted free and they were picked up by the lifeboat. Stephen recounts with great verve the tale of the nail scissors and tells how the rescued captain dried out rolls of foreign notes on radiators, but he fails to mention the appalling weather conditions and waves of up to 20 feet.

Many of Dunmore East crew are fishermen, or used to fish but now work on shore. On July 9, 1976, two local boys went out fishing in an 18ft open boat which was driven on to rocks at the base of 100-foot cliffs, right in the area of lobster pots and salmon nets. One boy was clinging to his boat and eventually, using parachute flares and searchlights and helped by directions shouted by people on the cliff, the lifeboat spotted him. The rescue could hardly have been more difficult. The lifeboat's unprotected propellers were especially vulnerable because of the nets and pots and the only narrow passage was through shallow water strewn with large boulders. To make matters worse, the lifeboat was stern to sea and if a wave picked her up she could surf right into the rocks. The crew were lined up on the bows of the lifeboat and threw the boy a lifebuoy. He grabbed the ring and was quickly hauled to the lifeboat. As soon as he was safe the lifeboat, now only 20 feet from the rocks, immediately went astern. A six-hour search was carried out for the second lad but he had already been swept away and drowned.

Stephen was awarded a bar to his bronze medal for this service but, even more important to him, the rescue had been a real team effort with lookouts in the bows advising him just how far he was from the rocks. Stephen, in common with all lifeboat coxswains, regards his crew as the best in the service: 7 have great respect for the lads. Without them you cannot carry on. When they are with you for a few years, they soon know what you are going to do without the need to put it over to them directly. You take it for granted they are going to do the right thing for you, without being told.' His satisfaction is that of all coxswains and crews: 'If you know you have really saved them, that those lads were doomed to die and that there was no other choice for them, it is one good deed you have done.

It is the actual saving and putting them on the quay. I don't know whether the man above is there to guide you, but there is certainly someone keeping an eye on you and telling you those fellows are out there - and if you don't do the right thing, you will be in the drink with them.' As a true seaman, Stephen knows that, even with years of experience and the best equipment available, there is never room for arrogance or complacency: ' You always think that you are going to master the sea, but no, you must always respect it: it is always the mighty one.'.