1. Loadsamoney!
It costs £240,000 a day to keep the R.N.L.I. afloat. An all-weather lifeboat costs £1,800,000. An inshore lifeboat costs £76,000. A full kit for a crew member costs £450. All of this has to be raised through voluntary contributions…

2. The Welsh armada (and then some…) Stretching from Flint in the north, to Penarth in the south, there are 31 lifeboat stations situated along the Welsh coastline. In total, there are 223 lifeboat stations on the coasts of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.

3. My boat’s bigger than your boat
The R.N.L.I. operates 9 classes of boat, ranging from the all-Weather Mersey to the Inshore atlantic 21. Each boat is designed to deal with the specific situations and conditions presented by different areas of the coastline.

4. Pluck luck
Since being founded by Sir William Hillary in 1824, the R.N.L.I. lifeboats have saved over 133,500 lives. In 1999, it averaged 15 launches per day, and saved an average of 3 lives per day.

5. Roll call
There are more than 4,300 volunteers crewing throughout the country, including 180 women.

6. Oh my darling!
The first modern heroine of the seas was Grace Darling, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper on Farne Islands. On the 7th of September 1838, Grace and her father rowed through torrential storms to reach the wreck of the Forfarshire. They saved nine lives.

7. Take the second left after the lights, and it’s straight ahead on your right
In the days of rickets and scurvy, navigation at sea was all in the stars. Celestial Navigation required the taking of altitudes and azimuths of stars, then combining that information with that of a chronometer reading and an almanac.

8. Press that button, and it’ll tell you where we are
These days navigation revolves around receiving and interpreting acoustic or electromagnetic signals transmitted from known locations.

9. It don’t work!
Machinery failure accounts for 50% of all RNLI call-outs.

10. Fishy tale
Galileo Galilei, the 16th Century Italian astronomer who proved that the Earth orbited the Sun, was also the man who discovered Cod.