Sunken ketch at Balmain, Sydney

Good of you to make the call.

We had a yacht come off a mooring here a fortnight ago at about 0630 and drift down the river before running aground on a sandbar. Security bloke on his way to work saw it at 0630 and rang the rescue association. 0930 I was told about it as I was walking my dog and checked its position. I rang the owner who was in Hobart to tell him and he had just received a call from another resident who had noticed the yacht as he looked out his window.
All the rescue association did was leave a message with the MSB [it was a Sunday morning] Dozens of locals and visitors had walked along this walk and not done a thing! They had talked among them selves of course.
Three hours after the boat came off the mooring my mate and I went aboard and we set the anchor out in deep water. Later that evening one of the local commercial fishing vessels towed her clear.
The rescue association refused to help. They also refused to help another yachtsman a fortnight earlier when we had a flood and a tree carried his yacht and mooring down the river. Both days they sat about in the two large vessels we paid for in their impressive uniforms!
I run a community Facebook page for the local yachts. Several of the owners live elsewhere, Canberra, Goulburn, Sydney, Wollongong etc and if something goes wrong I can contact them through that. The MSB will not give out numbers which is fair enough. Its very much a case of neighbours looking after each other.

Sadly Marine Rescue were sued by a yacht owner. This owners yacht broke loose while he was absent. Marine rescue recovered the vessel which was placed on another mooring only to have it brake loose again and this time damaged. There insurance won't cover the cost of damage that occurs after they take charge of an unoccupied vessel. Perhaps they should have applied international salvage law when dealing with litigation loving '''holes.
Don't blame Marine Rescue. These guys do a great job promoting boating safety, keeping us safe, rescue of you and your vessel. They don't get paid for this and put their own lives on the line to save yours. I recently returned from Cornwall in the UK. There I visited two Royal Life Boat stations, one at Mousehole, the other at Saint Ives. Both these stations have lost entire crews attempting to save lives. I hope Australian MR groups never suffer the same loss.