This year’s Lyme Park John O’Goats on 6^th Jan is in aid of Cheshire Search and Rescue (CSAR).

I’m looking for volunteers to help out at Registration/Results, and for control placing (I’m hoping to get a few out the previous evening, but could do with

a bit of a help on the day)

If anyone has offers of things for prizes and/or raffle tickets then please let me know.

I’ve been a member of CSAR now for 2 years, but before that hadn’t really heard of them so I thought I’d give you a few pointers.

They are a member of Lowland Rescue and are on of a number of volunteer-only organisations that augment the work of the emergency services in the field of search and rescue (others include Mountain Rescue (MR), Cave Rescue and RNLI. The tagline for Lowland Rescue is “From Hill to High Water” – this emphasises that most of our callouts take place on land, above ground and not in mountainous terrain. Our terrain can include urban, parks, forests, farmland, moors, rivers and canals. Whereas MR specialise more in rescues, our emphasis is usually on searching and we assist nearby MR units when they had lowland searches to do. Whereas mountain rescues are typically for people who have had an accident or got lost, our “customers” are missing for many reasons - this includes small children who strolled off, people missing from old people’s homes, those who are depressed, suicidal, drug/alcohol problems, asperger’s or dementia - many of might not know they are missing and/or might not want to be found.

All travel to training, meetings and call-outs is at the volunteer’s own expense (and indeed even on a call-out we have to pay for the new Runcorn Bridge) and we provide the majority of the clothing and equipment we use ourselves. Money raised through our collecting boxes, bag-packs and First Aid cover goes towards the upkeep of technical equipment and vehicles.

You can see more about the activities of Cheshire SAR on

The website: http://www.cheshire-sarteam.org/

Or on Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/CheshireSAR/

Cheers