Gosport and Fareham Inshore Rescue Service
building in Gosport, Gosport, England, UK
Gosport and Fareham Inshore Rescue Service (GAFIRS) is a volunteer-operated independent lifeboat charity based in Gosport, Hampshire, England. It operates free lifeboat services from its station in Alverstoke covering the stretch of the Solent from Portsmouth Harbour to Titchfield Haven.
GAFIRS is on call with HM Coastguard 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When lifeboat crews are not on station, they are ready for an immediate launch via pager callout. In addition to the frontline lifeboat service, GAFIRS helps the county's other emergency services respond to inland incidents such as flooding, snow rescue and inland water rescues.
2009 marked the charity's 40th anniversary.
Independent status
There are 235 RNLI-owned lifeboat stations around the United Kingdom, and there are 65 lifeboat stations which are not owned or managed by the RNLI, such as GAFIRS. Like the RNLI, GAFIRS provides services to HM Coastguard whose equipment, training, policies and procedures comply with the Maritime and Coastguard Agency's Rescue Boat Code of Practice.
In 2010, GAFIRS and other independent lifeboat stations in the United Kingdom launched an awareness campaign to remove the common public misconception that there is only one charity "Saving Lives at Sea." The campaign, titled "Go Orange for Indie Lifeboat", aims to educate members of the public that donations to the RNLI may not actually be going towards their local lifeboat station if it is one of the independent ones, such as GAFIRS or Ryde Inshore Rescue.
Patron
The patron of Gosport and Fareham Inshore Rescue Service is Surgeon Rear Admiral Lionel John Jarvis who became patron July 2023. Previous patrons have included yachtswoman Dee Caffari, and Lady Margaret Fieldhouse.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gosport and Fareham Inshore Rescue Service” is building in Gosport, Gosport, England, UK. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gosport, Fareham and Inshore, not as a finished interpretation.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5587447. Authority coordinates are 50.779, -1.149. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2009, 2010 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gosport and Fareham Inshore Rescue Service” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.