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Easter marks the start of the busy rescue season at Spurn Point. Michael Hickling meets the men who keep the Humber safe.
The neat houses are only marked out as exceptional by the front gardens where children's toys lie about, an open invitation to the light-fingered. Ditto the bicycles apparently abandoned on verges by the roadside.
But the residents have good reason to be trusting about possessions left outdoors. They live in a community that never sleeps and potential thieves have no escape.
This is the edge of nowhere, there are no passers-by in the ordinary sense and the only way forward is into the waves. One other thing makes this neighbourhood unique. It's the men who are the stay-at-homes.
We are at a lifeboat station which like no other - the only one out of the 232 situated around our coasts that has a full crew of paid employees who live on the base. It is the only way to organise the Humber boat so it operates effectively.
Spurn is the wisp of land that arches out improbably into the sea and here at its remote tip seven men and their families have opted for isolation in order to be on the spot when danger arises.
One of them is Dave Steenvoorden, a Grimsby fisherman with a Dutch name known to everyone as Spanish. He used to work on fishing boats from Spain in the days when they required a British crew if fishing in our waters.
Dave is second generation Dutch - his father was a chief engineer who came over from Holland to fish out of Grimsby. When the industry took a dive, Dave worked on oil rigs and stand-by vessels and then became a lifeboatman 17 years ago. He is now superintendent coxwain and the front door of his home marks the start of a sprint challenge of about a quarter of a mile. That's the distance he must run or ride (the reason for all the bikes lying around) on a call-out. It's a race against time which will bring him to the end of a steel jetty beyond which the Pride of the Humber lifeboat rides at anchor.
The jetty also accommodates the launches of the Humber pilots....