Brixham A&E doctor shares her experiences working with Torbay RNLI

Even after 200 years, a new generation of crew members is poised to take the RNLI into its third century.

One such crew member is Iona Taylor, an A&E doctor at Torbay Hospital who’s taken part in five ocean crossings.

“I’ll do anything to get back out to sea,” said Iona, “It’s a different way of living, a different way of thinking. You have to be completely reliant on yourself and your boat.”

After crossing the Atlantic twice, the Pacific twice and the Indian Ocean once, Iona turned her attention to the next challenge, saving lives at sea.

She said: “I’ve always wanted to combine medicine and sailing, and the RNLI is a great way of doing that. Working in A&E gives me technical experience but being in the RNLI boat gives me huge confidence in every situation. When you pick someone up at the bottom of a cliff during a storm, you think it can’t get much more difficult than that.”

At the end of her training and after over 20 shouts, Iona already has some profound memories in the lifeboat.

She remembers one such moment, when the station got a call about an unresponsive male at the bottom of a cliff during a storm.

“In those moments, your head instantly goes into overdrive,” said Iona.

“When we found him, I got out of the boat and checked his pulse. I couldn’t find one on the wrist or the neck. And when you're that stressed, your own heart is racing so I couldn’t tell if it was my pulse I could feel or his. But as I turned to my crew, his hand moved to mine and I knew he was still alive. It was an immense relief.”

However, Iona has also been at the receiving end of the RNLI herself, during a race off Brixham during the King’s Coronation last year.

She explained: “We were in the middle of a boat race, about five miles off Berry Head. I started to notice the bow of the boat was getting deeper and deeper into the water.

“We opened the companionway hatch and there was water up to the saloon table, we were at least a third full of water.”

It turned out that the gasket on the window had failed and the window had popped open, allowing water to pour into the boat.

Iona continued: “We called Mayday and started bailing, desperately trying to stop the boat from sinking.  I was training at the time, so it was interesting putting out a Mayday call to my own team. That was one of my first shouts, I was just on the wrong boat!”