North Shore Living caught up with Lance Miller, who has spent the past 45 years volunteering at Marine Rescue Middle Harbour, battling the elements to protect people on the water.
Local Lance Miller says one of the main reasons that he started volunteering with Mosman’s Marine Rescue was because he simply wanted to learn how to operate a boat.
“Broken Bay was too far for me to go. Botany Bay I didn’t like the boats – they were big boats, and I knew I’d have a little boat one day. So, I went to Middle Harbour because they had small boats,” Lance says.
“So, that’s the reason. I went there to learn to drive a boat and now I teach other people to do that,” he laughs.
Lance has worn many hats over the years as part of the Middle Harbour team, and his role today is as the boat master.
“A ferry master hops on the ferry and goes from one wharf to another wharf, avoiding the rocks and the breakers and the big waves. That’s his job. Our job is to go into where the rocks are and the breakers are to get to someone who’s in trouble with their boat jammed in there,” Lance says.
“We are a totally different entity to your ferry masters in the world, in that where they avoid, this is where we go into.”
Lance has also trained new volunteers and takes this job seriously, as he knows there can be dire consequences if there is a member of the team who isn’t trained properly or isn’t confident in their role.
“What we do is a lot of fun, first off. Second what we do is also very, very dangerous,” he says.
Lance says they were once on a job where one member of the team went into shock because, despite completing six months of training, they hadn’t been out in action before.
“At times you’ve got to really have a lot of faith in the guys around you and try and train to the point where you know everyone is reliable and won’t fall apart under pressure.”
Marine Rescue Middle Harbour doesn’t only head out to rescues in terrible conditions, with the teams attending incidents no matter the context, time or weather.
“We got a call one day and the radio officer came out and said, ‘Lance, I’ve just had a strange call. This fellow called us and said he’s coming into Sydney but is not sure where he is.’”
Lance says it was a beautiful day with not a cloud in sight and flat water, but as the crew didn’t know the location three little boats were deployed to search for the vessel that needed help.
“We split up and went boat to boat,” Lance says.
“As soon as you came towards a boat, they looked at you like, ‘Why are you coming over?’ You’d give them a wave and they’d wave back, so then onto the next boat.
“We found one that no one was waving at us, so we did about eight knots heading towards the 35-footer.”
The crew ended up boarding the boat and finding two people who were ‘out cold’.
“The exhaust on the boat had failed, and he had the canopies up everywhere since it was a cold day. They had been asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide fumes.”
With ‘so many different goings on’ Lance may have recently retired from his full-time job as a tradie, but he doesn’t see himself retiring from Marine Rescue any time soon.