They're the eyes of Portsmouth Harbour: Here's how the Gosport NCI helps keep you safe...

From 9am until 7.30pm every day bar one, the eyes of the volunteers of the National Coastwatch Institution are on the harbour ready to raise the alarm if they see anyone in distress.

And in a recent incident - that’s just what they did.

On the evening of July 18, volunteers at the NCI Gosport sprang into action as they watched a teenage boy screaming for help as he fought against the stiff current at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour.

Colin Church, the station manager at NCI Gosport, says: ‘Janet and Mike were on duty for our evening watch that Monday and spotted the group of teenagers who were playing with a ball on the Hotwalls beach.

The Hotwalls at Old Portsmouth is a non-swimming beach, but a constant problem for Gosport NCI volunteers in their signal tower in Gosport, who frequently spot and deal with incidents which occur there as a result of the strong tides.

‘The ball inevitably ended up in the water with the boy in pursuit. As soon as the boy entered the water our watchkeepers identified him as a possible “vulnerable”.

‘Within a few minutes, the boy got into trouble with the strong ebb current and our eagle-eyed team made the call to put out a Mayday Relay on VHF Channel 16 alerting all mariners to the incident and promptly followed this with a call to the QHM to notify him of the same, so any commercial traffic were made aware.’

The swimmer was saved by a passing fishing vessel, handed over to a police rigid inflatable boat and taken to land.

‘Thankfully the incident had a happy ending, but we had two other swimmers in difficulty the day before also resulting in the deployment of the Gosport and Fareham Inshore Rescue Service [GAFIRS],’ says Colin.

‘It’s important we get the message out to everyone of the dangers of swimming off the Hotwalls beach,’ he adds.

This is just one of 32 incidents that Gosport NCI has dealt with in the past year.

The National Coastwatch Institution (NCI) is a maritime safety organisation and registered charity which operates all over the UK, with about 60 stations manned by more than 2,500 volunteers. It was created in 1994 when two fishermen lost their lives off the Cornish coast near a recently-closed coastguard lookout,

The Gosport NCI station is in historic Fort Blockhouse, once part of submarine base HMS Dolphin. In the 19th century the fort was one of the set which encircled much of Gosport.

Today the fort is surrounded on three sides by water and provides the best view of the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour, making it the perfect lookout point for Gosport NCI to observe and keep daylight visual and radio watch over Portsmouth Harbour.

The fort - usually not accessible to the public - will, this weekend, be open as part of the annual Heritage Open Days event in Gosport.

Even on what the watchkeepers, all of whom are unpaid volunteers, describe as a ‘quiet day’ there are multiple radio calls coming in and and plenty to keep them busy.

Erica Dawtrey was the first woman volunteer at NCI Gosport and she has been a watchkeeper for 12 years. She says: ‘We’re constantly keeping an eye out for anything that looks as if someone could be in trouble.’

‘It can be a lot of pressure and if there’s an incident then it’s a question of who does what when.’

Much like most other NCI stations, Gosport has Declared Facility status, meaning the station is regarded as a coastguard ‘asset’ like the RNLI and other lifeboat services. To obtain the status, watchkeepers undergo rigorous training and exams every year.

Richard Suggitt has been a watchkeeper for two-and-a-half years and is one of about 70 volunteers at the Gosport station which was founded in 2008.

‘Every morning when we open we phone the coastguard to say we’re here, as well as the harbour master,’ Richard says. ‘The harbour is controlled like air traffic control and you have a military harbour master who controls the larger vessels. At the end of the day we tell them both we’re closing. They need to be aware because they often call us to find things out.’

The station’s first port of call in a mayday scenario – an international radio distress signal used by any vessel with a radio which usually indicates an emergency in which life is in danger – is to report to the coastguard, who has the authority to call out a lifeboat.

Richard adds: ‘For every event where we call Mayday or raise the alarm, there’s probably 20 near misses where we watch somebody, but it turns out all right in the end. But if we weren't here, what would the coastguard do? They’d launch a lifeboat to try to find them,’ he says.

NCI Gosport not only prevents the coastguard from wasting valuable resources but is also a crucial resource to anyone out on the water searching – as the best vantage point of Portsmouth Harbour’s narrow entrance.

Richard says: ‘Once the lifeboat is out searching for somebody, we can talk to the lifeboat if we’ve got sight of the casualty and help steer them in. We’re part of that three-point triangle.’

However, despite working closely with the coastguard and rescue services, NCI Gosport is legally and financially separate. While the public are well aware of the help provided by the coastguard and lifeboat services, the volunteers say getting the word out about their own charitable organisation is not so easy and often leaves them funding events and marketing out of their own pockets.

With no government or other funding, the NCI Gosport station relies on these fundraising efforts to buy essential equipment, such as high-powered telescopes and radio monitoring of at least five maritime VHF channels, and pay bills and therefore welcomes donations.

For more information, to make a donation or become a watchkeeper visit nci.org.uk/gosport.