FIGURES released today reveal that volunteer crews with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in the North have experienced one of their busiest years.

The figures show that RNLI lifeboatmen and women in the North of England carried out 1,137 services and rescued 1,129 people, spending 1,520 hours at sea.

In the North-East region Paul Nicholson, senior helmsman with Sunderland RNLI, said: "Once again 2007 has proved to be a very challenging year for our 20-strong team of operational volunteers.

"As well as dealing with emergency call-outs, the crews have needed to put in a lot of extra hours training with the arrival of our new Atlantic 85 lifeboat."

In May last year, Sunderland became only the second lifeboat station in the North to receive the latest Atlantic 85 Inshore Lifeboat, which was funded by the staff and customers of Wolseley UK.

During the year, lifeboat volunteers responded to a range of incidents, from people in difficulty in the water, to a single handed yachtsman who had become disorientated because of extreme tiredness.

Andrew Ashton RNLI divisional inspector, north, said: "We expected rescue figures to be down for 2007 because of the particularly poor summer, but clearly the bad weather didn't put people off heading for the coast and setting out to sea."