Cloughey Lifeboat
3rd February 1950
Extract from Belfast Telegraph
Cloughey Lifeboat
Men tell of grim 38-hour ordeal in raging seasIn heavy seas and a howling wind, Cloughey (Co Down) life-boat put out early this morning and brought off the seven-man crew of the South Rock Lightship, which broke her moorings in Monday night's gale.
This sentence hardly does justice to the drama and fear experienced by the lifeboatmen and lightship crew on that day almost 60 years ago. The lightship Shearwater had broken adrift on 1 February 1950. Lightships had emergency anchors which were dropped by the crew and it was these anchors which held the vessel and prevented her from going on the rocks near Portavogie. However, it was a long day and night of standby for both crews as both vessels were battered by wind and wave and it was feared that the moorings would not hold. As a witness in the lifeboat crew related, 'if the emergency chain had broken it would have been goodbye to the ship and crew because they would have been driven on the rocks'.
After being rescued, and after some had been immersed in the sea on attempting to transfer to the lifeboat, the exhausted seamen were taken ashore to Cloghey, received by Mrs Bell The Shieling, given refreshments and sent home!
One man among the crew was Joey Smyth, who was 16 years old at the time. He later went to sea but subsequently returned to Irish Lights in September 1972 as a temporary AB on the South Rock