A MAN who made a hoax call to send a lifeboat out left the police with a clue to track him down - his mobile phone number.

Minehead's RNLI lifeboat was launched at 10.45pm on Tuesday evening after a man called 999 to report an object floating in the water 100 yards off Porlock Weir.

Nothing was found, but the call is now being linked to another made to police earlier in the day.

This one purported to come from a visitor staying at Warren Bay holiday park, near Watchet, who said he had seen a flashing light in the Weston-super-Mare direction.

Coastguards investigated but nothing was seen and no further action was taken.

In each case the caller gave a different name but the calls were made from the same mobile number. And comparison of the recordings of the calls has now shown they were both made by the same person.

Coastguards say that, aside from any police investigation into the incidents, they could ask the mobile phone company to block his number, making his phone unusable.

A coastguard spokesman said: "It is something we and all the emergency services have the power to do if nuisance calls persist."

Minehead lifeboat's management committee chairman Dr Bryan Stoner said hoax calls were a problem - but could not be ignored.

"The fact that the local coastguards immediately went to Porlock Weir on Tuesday night but could find no-one who had made a call or who had seen anything in the water only serves to underline the fact that we were probably sent on a fool's errand," he said.

"But we cannot afford to assume anything, particularly at night. We have to respond to every situation which appears to be an emergency even if it turns out we have launched - and the RNLI has incurred considerable expense - for no good reason.

"But the annoying thing is that we would well be delayed in responding to a genuine emergency call, and lives could be put at risk, if we are tied up elsewhere thanks to someone who to gets a perverse kick out of seeing flashing blue lights and watching lifeboats in action.

"The positive side to this is that modern technology has already enabled the phone number to be identified and that, with the voice recordings, may indeed lead to the caller being traced as well."