Volunteers from Lowestoft RNLI were called out after a report a large, bright red liferaft was seen drifing in the sea.

The lifeboat crew were called out at 8.54am this morning (Saturday, January 19), to check if the liferaft was empty.

Lifeboat coxswain John Fox said: 'We were told that a liferaft had been seen off Pakefield but we found that it had in fact been blown further north and we located it 500 metres off the harbour entrance.

'A vessel had reported losing a 16-man liferaft overboard yesterday, so we were asked to recover the inflatable so that it could be confirmed as the missing one and to avoid any further reports.

'It had a sea achor deployed which took a bit of pulling up, but we soon recovered it and attached a tow line to the inflatable and brought it to the Yacht Club where it was handed over to the Lowestoft Coastguard Rescue Team.'