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Every year, an army of unpaid volunteers from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution spend half-a-million hours saving lives at sea - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, whatever the weather.

In Cornwall, newest recruit, 18-year-old Shaunna, is following in her grandfather's footsteps. After a successful first rescue of a teenage holidaymaker, she has hopes to one day become Newquay's first helmswoman.

In the remote fishing village of Oban on the west coast of Scotland, the RNLI have another new 18-year-old recruit. Young Andrew and the rest of the crew are given a painful reminder of the dangers all lifeboat volunteers face when they are woken by their pagers in the middle of the night to try and rescue the captain and crew of a fishing boat that is sinking having run aground in the middle of a storm.

Volunteering with the RNLI inevitably means encountering and risking death, and it is a sacrifice that takes its toll on the crew-members and their families. But, coming as it does with the opportunity for ordinary men and women to save human life, it also has its own very unique rewards.