CAULIFLOWERS, an empty spread pot and a pub quiz have raised more than £760 for the Hope Cove Lifeboat.

Three Kingston residents started raising money for the lifeboat after they were rescued, while the Dolphin Inn added to the total with their pub quiz.

Viv Freeman, John Tucker and Martin Uren, who liken themselves to the trio in Last of the Summer Wine, were fishing off Wiscombe on the last day of September 2014 when their battery died, leaving them unable to restart the engine.

Since then, Viv and John have been raising money for the Hope Cove Lifeboat. Viv goes to see John on Monday and picks up cauliflowers and other produce, puts them in his wheelbarrow and sells them for a donation to the lifeboat’s ‘Sinking Fund’.

Viv kept all the cash in a ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ pot and had over £580 in there. Added to the money raised for the charity by the Dolphin Inn pub quiz, they were able to hand over £772 to Graham Phillips, chair of the Hope Cove Lifeboat.

‘The speed that they got to us and the local knowledge of the crew is so important’, said John, while Viv said: ‘We wanted to give our thanks to the lifeboat and the crew, I’ll keep raising money for them.’

Graham Phillips told the packed Dolphin Inn on Wednesday evening at their quiz night, that ‘its not easy to run a lifeboat on voluntary donations’ and ‘thank you on behalf of Hope Cove Lifeboat, for helping us keep going’.

On that day in September, Viv, John and Martin discovered they had no signal on their mobile phones and with the swell pushing them onto the rocks they dropped the anchor and ‘anything else that would work’ over the side and thought ‘what do we do now?’

As neither John nor Viv could swim, and being too far away from the shore for that to be an option anyway, they sent up a distress flare. Hope Cove Lifeboat arrived within 20 minutes.

The trio found out later that the Coastguard had received 16 calls from people who had seen the flare go up from the shore.

‘It was such a relief to hear those engines’, said Viv, known as Captain Flack since his volunteer fire-fighter days after the Trumpton fireman, ‘and there were some laughs as soon as the crew saw it was us.’

The lifeboat towed them back to Burgh Island and they were back out fishing the next day, but with new engine batteries.

Dolphin Inn quizmaster Andy Summer Nutting said that over the last four and a half years, the Dolphin Inn pub quiz had raised about £12,000 for charity.