News & Reports

Summary of Incidents

Coastguard Whakatāne usually attend about 60 incidents and calls for assistance each year and provided many thousands of radio reports and trip reports, sometimes over 400 per day. Whakatāne Rescue is called out about 40 times to provide assistance to members and others. The time spent helping boaties by our rescue vessels is over 500 manhours each year. In addition, our radio Operators logged 25,000 calls to and from boatees. These calls are made up of 22,000 VHF calls, 400 SSB calls and 2,000 phone calls. The main problems experienced by boaties are motor failures, steering problems and flat batteries. Incidents resulting in Whakatāne Rescue call-outs were for recovering people in the water from capsized boats, people being washed out to sea, and search and rescue missions for missing boaties. There were a number of capsizes on Whakatāne, Thornton, Ohiwa and Opotiki bars so extra care is needed when crossing these bars.

Sponsorship Programme

In 2015 Whakatāne Coastguard established a new sponsorship programme consisting of business agreements with sponsors. The programme is based on our website, particularly the Barcam Page. Each year our website has nearly half a million page views. These come from marine orientated internet users from all over the world. The average monthly visits the our website are over 35,000 per month. Three sponsorship plans are offered to organisations that are willing to financially support Whakatāne Coastguard activities. The sponsorships levels are $500, $1000, and $4,5000 and each level provide sponsors different levels of exposure on the Barcam Page, Page Footers and promotion over our VHF radio network. Interested parties should contact Whakatāne Coastguard Headquarters for more information.

Membership and Support

For many years the membership of Whakatāne Coastguard has remained constant at about 1200 members. This makes our Coastguard one of the largest in New Zealand and we try hard to service members needs by providing search and rescue services and a radio communications network. During the past year we either attended or assisted over 60 incidents where our members or members of the public have been in trouble. We would like to thank the many individuals, organisations and businesses who have supported us with funds, products and services over the years and helped us in our quest to “save lives at sea”.