The old rescue station

From Strandfogedgård to Abelines Gaard

Today we know the farm on the west coast of Jutland as Abelines Gaard, but before that, before Abeline had even moved into the farm, it was a beach bailiff's farm and Abeline's father-in-law was a beach bailiff.

It was the beach bailiff's job to supervise and report strandings and salvage operations on his part of the beach. It was also at the beach bailiff farms that shipwrecks spent the night when they were rescued ashore. Abelines Gaard housed, among others, the sailors from the German ship Elisabeth Rickmers, which in 1894 ran aground on the part of the coast belonging to the farm. Today you can still find traces of the great shipwreck, see e.g. see if you can find the nameplate from the big ship!

Haurvig Rescue Station

At Abelines Gaard there is a rescue station with a boathouse, rocket house and telephone shed. It is the old Haurvig Rescue Station.

The rescue station was established in 1860 as a modest rocket station. It wasn't until 1882 that a separate building was constructed to house the rescuers' equipment. In 1887, the station was expanded with a larger building and a newly built lifeboat from the Naval Dockyard in Copenhagen. In 1933, the station, like the surrounding ones, was closed down when the tasks of the rescue stations were combined in a new station with a motor lifeboat in the new town of Hvide Sande. However, Haurvig, which until 1939 served as a rocket depot for Hvide Sande Rescue Station, was not initially abandoned.

64 castaways were rescued

Four times a year, the local rescue guild would meet and test their skills so that they knew exactly what to do when a stranding occurred. But the activity was never as extensive in Haurvig as it was in many other places on the west coast of Jutland, where the small rescue stations in the decades around 1900 often reached several hundred rescued sailors. Haurvig rescued 64 castaways in 15 operations. All of them came ashore using the rocket apparatus - so the lifeboat was never used.

See the lifeboat and phone shack

The boathouse now houses a replica of a lifeboat. The phone shack has been moved from the beach to the rescue station. When the station was still in use, the shed was located on the beach so that a sentry could quickly call for help.

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