At dinner last night I was having a bit of a hard time describing the boats that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI, which is somewhat like UK’s version of the US Coast Guard Service) uses.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are some. The bigger rigid hull inflatables are Atlantic class rescue lifeboats equipped with GPS navigation and self-righting capabilities. They are named after Atlantic College on the north coast of the Bristol Channel, where these pictures were taken during a reunion visit. Nowadays, they launch and land the boats with a special-purpose tractor/trailer/net. Back in the old days, we did everything by hand.

The smaller boats are built by students at the school for training. S4, the boat I trained on, was still around.