Lifeboat volunteers called to a motor boat which ran aground carried passengers 30 metres across thick mud as they faced a "race against time".

Southend's RNLI crew were paged at 7pm on Monday to the eight-meter motor vessel with three people onboard which had run aground at the entrance to Smallgains Creek on Canvey.

The charity's rescue hovercraft was launched and volunteers arrived on the scene within 30 minutes to find the passengers happy to stay onboard until the next tide. However, volunteers say the situation "escalated rapidly" when one of the passengers took a turn for the worse.

Due to the terrain, the hovercraft could not get close to the vessel and the crew carried the passenger across the mud to their lifeboat and gave first aid while they headed to Island Yacht Club slipway to meet coastguard rescue teams and paramedics.

Anthony Bonham, Southend RNLI hovercraft commander, said: "This was most certainly a challenging job which turned from a simple vessel aground to a race against time.

"We couldn’t get very close to the casualty vessel due to obstacles, the mud is thick around these creeks. The crew worked very hard, and did a great job giving first aid and transferring the casualties to the hovercraft."

Once the paramedics had taken over first aid, the hovercraft crew headed back to the boat to take off the remaining passengers, with another also being carried across the mud.

The lifeboat crew stood down more than three hours later and returned to station at 10.30pm.

An RNLI spokesman added: "The terrain around the shore is littered with rocks and wreckage making navigation very tricky. Local knowledge and training was the key to the hovercraft's safe passage.

"Incidents like this really test the crew's intensive RNLI training and they performed at an outstanding level."