Oban’s RNLI lifeboat, Mora Edith Macdonald, was called out on Sunday 1st February at 19.03. Members of the public were reporting seeing a red flare in Oban Bay.

The lifeboat crew searched the bay thoroughly for an hour. This required the use of  illuminating white parachute flares, search lights and night vision equipment.

Coastguards assisted from the shore but nothing was found. The Lifeboat was re-fuelled and ready for service again at 20.20.

It is thought that the flare was illegally let off from the shoreline in the Dunollie area. This sort of shout is, unfortunately part and parcel of the busy professional life of Scotland’s busiest lifeboat.

Flares are for emergency use only. There are different flares for different circumstances:

• Orange smoke flares and red parachute flares are used as distress signals. Orange smoke is a daylight distress signal. The smoke hangs thickly in a cloud close to the stricken boat. Red parachute flares are used at night and, in good conditions, are visible for a range of thirty miles.
• White parachute flares are used in darkness for illuminating the sea area in the vicinity of a distress flare

Flares have a variety of shapes and of activation mechanisms. Reading an instruction sheet makes it sound simple. It feels quite different when they’re in your hand and you have to let them off successfully. It feels even more different when you may only have one hand free in an emergency situation, storm-tossed or sinking, at risk of  physical danger and afraid.

For these reasons, it is clearly important for sailors to have the chance to find out what using flares is like. Flares prior to their expiry date may be used legally by coastguards and other rescue service personnel for exactly this sort of demonstration purpose.

When these qualified personnel plan test and demonstration firings, they notify the police and, in this area, Clyde Coastguard, well in advance, They supply the proposed time and location of the demonstration. They also notify these authorities again five minutes before the start of the exercise and five minutes afterwards.

This means that within those times and from this location the rescue authorities may be reasonably sure that any public sightings of flares will be from the test firing. Before or after the notified times they can assume that any reported flares are a genuine distress signal.

The Dunollie beach firing is almost certainly an example of irresponsible casual firing. Flares are of course attractive to young people who have no idea of their explosive power on ignition. Someone was either given or took flares from their registered location and activated them – or found flares illegally dumped on the shoreline.

Once ignited, flares cannot be extinguished. They will continue to flare even if submerged in a bucket of water – or in the sea.

Firing flares casually is effectively crying wolf when there is no danger. Such behaviour is likely to lead to members of the public not bothering to report what may be a genuine distress flare, leading to potential – and avoidable – loss of life.

Most school pupils at some stage come across Robert Southey’s ballad The Inchcape Rock – a story of mischief and rough justice around what we now call the Bell Rock, off Scotland’s east coast. This conjures the sort of situation where what goes around comes around. Food for thought.