The Lyme Bay kayaking disaster was a 1993 incident that led to the death of four teenagers on a sea kayaking trip in the Lyme Bay area on the south coast of England. The incident led to legislation to regulate adventure activities centres working with young people in the United Kingdom. Incident On 22 March 1993, at 10.15 am, a group of eight schoolchildren, aged 16 – 17yrs, and their teacher from Southway Community College, Plymouth were accompanied by two instructors from St Albans Outdoor Centre on a kayak trip across Lyme Bay, in red Mirage Scout Kayaks. It was a sunny Sunday morning when the group set out. The party consisted of eight teenagers and two trainee instructors; a young man and a young woman. The trip should have taken about 2 hours. The instructors were later to be discovered to have had very minimal training and had only recently started in the sport themselves. Although the party intended to cross an open stretch of tidal water they had not informed the coastguard. Joe Stoddart, the adventure centre manager, became worried about the group and the time they were taking, but did not inform the authorities about the missing party. Instead, he waited two hours, while trying to conduct a search from the cliff tops using his car. Eventually he gave this up and went out in his boat to try to find the group, all the while failing to inform the authorities. At 2.43 pm a local fisherman found an empty kayak floating about south east of Lyme Regis. He radioed the Weymouth coastguard who scrambled a Sea King helicopter, from Portland after they finally received information that a party was missing. Initially, they dismissed this information and so there was a further 2 hour delay to the rescue operation starting. At 4:11 pm the Lyme Regis Lifeboat launched. The first rescues of the group's teacher and their young male instructor was made at 5:38 pm. During the period of 5.43pm to 6.40 pm, helicopters picked up the rest of the surviving students and the female instructor. Before the lifeboats and helicopters were scrambled, the coastguard phoned around to see if he could find out if anyone was missing a kayak. He pointed out that if the boat had had some identifying features such as a name, adventure centre name, phone number on it, then the whole process