As Rhossili Coastguard is a search and rescue, cliff team it requires us to carry a lot of equipment which is described below.

There are two winches available to us because we have recently been issued with a new one and so we have kept the old one as backup. The new winch is a dual winch, which allows us to bring up two ropes at a time as with the old winch the working line would have been winched up and the safety would have been pulled up by hand.

The (Blue) helmet is a general purpose and casualty helmet.

The alphine lite stretcher is a compact cliff rescue stretcher that is used when recovering an injured casualty from the cliff face. The stretcher has attached to it numerous straps and slings which can be seen in the picture above. The red and purple starps are used to secure the casualty to the stretcher and the orange and blue straps are used to recover the stretcher, either with our winch or a rescue helicopter.

The safety harness that we have can be used for three different operations: firstly it can be used by the cliff top safety person to get closer to the cliff edge and help the cliffman who is working on the cliff face, the second use is that it can be used as a recovery harness for casualties and thirdly it can be used as an emergency harness to lower other personnel.

The Cliff harness is a webbing full body harness that is worn by the cliff person who will be working on the cliff face.

The large stakes are 1.2 metres in length and are maunfactured of round mild steel, they are used for all the standard stake holdfasts whenever a person is to be supproted. The small stakes are manufactured from mild steel and a total of seven are used to form a herringbone holdfast in cirumstances where large stake holdfasts cannot be used.

The quadpod is used specifically for a technical rescue and to give added stability to the rescuing of a casualty. It can be used in many environments for different access, evacuation and rescue scenairos.

The emergency rescue sling is based on a helicopter rescue sling with few minor modifications. The chest strap seperates to allow securing of the casualty without them having to let go