Hundreds of Lives Saved... probably When Poole's Atlantic launched at 2050 on Easter Saturday this year the crew thought they were searching for red flares.

Instead, when they arrived at the scene in a dark and uninhabited corner of Poole Harbour, they found moving infra-red lights - and the sound of shotguns! A substantial number of Easter Bunnies were seen diving for cover, and the lifeboat crew - very wisely - decided not to go ashore just yet! The arrival of a rather official looking boat with a blue light-even if it was a little reluctant to come too close - evidently distracted the marksmen, and as their lights faded rapidly away the rabbit population headed for its burrows.

Crew member Anne Millman later attributed the Cause of Service to 'Rabbits in Distress'; the Prime Cause of Incident as 'Shotgun Held at Nose Point1 and the Total Number of Survivors as 'lots', adding that there would have been hundreds more by the end of the shout...

Anne works at the Poole HQ spearheading the RNLI's youth promotion campaign and producing Storm Force News, so perhaps it's just as well that her younger readers won't hear her final remark: The crew won't be claiming salvage, but some rabbit pie wouldn't have gone amiss. Happy Easter!'.