Rescue boat’s name is a thank-you to generous Olsen cruise passengers

The generosity of passengers cruising on Fred.Olsen ships – who have raised thousands of pounds for the RNLI – is to be recognised in the name of a new inshore lifeboat.
An Atlantic-class inshore rescue boat at the Kyle of Lochalsh station in north-west Scotland is to be called Spirit of Fred. Olsen.
The boat, like the ones in the video above, will go into service next month, and a naming ceremony is being planned for early in 2012.
Emma Martin, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s corporate partnerships manager, said: “We are incredibly proud of the RNLI and Fred Olsen partnership which has gone from strength to strength over the last 40 years.
“Fred Olsen continues to make vital contributions to our lifesaving service and we would like to thank the passengers and crew who have donated so generously in order to put a new inshore lifeboat on service at Kyle of Lochalsh station. ”
The boat will also be a fitting tribute to Fred.Olsen marketing director Nigel Lingard, who retires next week after more than 23 years with the company.
At a reception yesterday in the Reform Club on London’s Pall Mall – from where the fictional traveller Phileas Fogg set off on his journey Around the World in Eighty Days – he joked about having commemorative T-shirts printed to celebrate his own farewell tour.
The inscriptions will have to be longer than originally envisaged; he should have flown home from Portugal after a goodbye cruise aboard Boudicca, in the company of 30 top travel agents. But when stormy sea conditions prevented the ship entering port, it turned for home in the UK.
Sadly for Nigel and his companions, the next stop was not Southampton or Dover, and they were not even able to take advantage of a helicopter med-evac off the Norfolk coast to jump ship. They faced four days of extra unscheduled travel before the ship finally reached Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The unexpected on-board party must have been one to remember.