The last lifeboatman at Spurn Point

The swallows swoop and dive down the lonely road to Spurn Point, a long finger of boulder clay and shingle stretching into the Humber estuary.

Cars navigate their way warily across the uneven surface – even on a calm day wind-blown sand lies in drifts across sections of the road, framed on one side by the sea, the other by the waters of the estuary.

The fragility of the road has been the undoing of a 200-year-old tradition of lifeboatmen living there alongside their families.

Superintendent Coxswain Dave Steenvoorden was the last to move his belongings off the Point yesterday, he and his wife Karen moving to nearby Easington, itself hardly a metropolis, but light years away from Spurn’s unique, but isolated, charms.

Click here to register and have your say on the YP stories and issues that matter to you

The Point was where they came to 22 years ago with their eight-year-old twins Karl and Scott, who grew up playing in the dunes and on the beach, and where Dave has been a key figure in a tight-knit community.

He says it will be a strange experience to return to his former home of 10 years in a week’s time, and sleep in his own bedroom, but on his own, his family home having become one of the new bunkhouses for the crew now operating a six-day on, six-day off shift system.

He says although many people have got it into their heads that Humber Lifeboat is closing, the change will actually see it better covered than before.

Three new members of crew have been recruited and costs have increased by 40 per cent, with the RNLI picking up the bill: “It is not a decision they have taken lightly”, he says.

“I think it will actually improve our service, you have dedicated people on stand-by without distractions.”

Life in Easington will be odd too – there will be shops, a pub and a bus service – Spurn lost its Spurn Ranger visitor service recently also because of the erosion – the phone won’t be ringing constantly and Karen will have to commute to work – back to Spurn Point where she is cook/steward for the Humber Pilots.

He turned down all media requests to film the move – it was too emotional.

“What will I miss? Number one definitely the place, just the ambience, the solitude, the big skies, the rat race is almost 30 miles away, number two, would be community, it is just a big extended family. You have your squabbles like any family, but in times of adversity people come together, if someone has a bereavement you all muck in together, when there’s sickness you run round, help with the shopping, generally you look after each other.

“Third it’s the kids, they are smashing, just proper kids. Your average 12-year-old is like a 16 and 17-year-old. Here they grow up with their age. I am not saying they are naive, they are pretty worldly-wise socially, their social skills are better because they have to fit in. I am going to miss being the single boss, that’s number four, and living with my wife, number five.”

As welfare officer, he has been first point of call for any family emergency: “As each year has come on we have had more problems up the road, just getting kids to school, wives to work, chasing parcels. It actually got more and more of the job to the point where it started to impact on what we are here for. As soon as we get a bit of weather it blows across and that’s why the decision was made.

“I don’t like it but it’s the right decision.”

The old links should remain strong – he and his wife have already planned Christmas. Both will be working that day and two other crew members, second coxswain Pete Hanscombe and mechanic Max Wilding and their wives, will be coming up to cook dinner.

For the last few years, the authorities’ view and that of Spurn’s owners has been not to interfere with natural processes, with no attempt to try and secure the weakest part of the link with the mainland.

Dave fears that it could take just one winter storm to see Spurn cut off – with an unstoppable flood of water coursing through the breach in the peninsula, washing millions of tonnes of liquid mud from Spurn Bight, into some of the country’s busiest shipping lanes, and potentially making it too shallow for the huge oil tankers coming into the estuary.

If that happens, he thinks then – belatedly – people will spring into action, building “the biggest concrete wall with a tarmac road on top.”

The last time it breached was in December 1850, three-quarters of a mile north of Smeaton’s lighthouse. Fishing boats were soon using it as a short cut, with the lifeboat itself recorded as having passed through the breach on February 29, 1850.

It took five years, a ban on the commercial collection of shingle, the installation of groynes and thousands of tonnes of chalk to stop it up.

“It will get to that stage sooner or later where major decisions will have to be made,” says Dave. “The expert view is that it won’t breach, it will just wash over. I think if we don’t do anything there will be a massive problem at the top (at a place called the Narrows).

“You have got millions and millions of cubic metres of soft silt and sand inside the Bight, If you start to get a flow through I am quite certain it will affect shipping channels.

“A quarter to a third of our petrochemicals come up and down that channel and I can’t believe they can afford it to let it shallow up. Natural England make all the decisions.

“They have said we can’t do anything to the road. What we have got is what we have got.

“We can’t bring in anything to protect it. I just think the situation is ridiculous. Spurn Point is internationally famous for birds, flowers, it is a site of special scientific interest.”