Saw the Portland(?) cab on "Beach Rescue" do a lovely boat txfr, LHS to, so impressed I mentioned it to my boys as an example of lovely flying - and I'm a military man. Likewise the S61 boys dealt with their fire very smoothly.
As stated, the "civs" doing SAR are ex-mil in the majority so we can expect a similar standard of ability/tenacity - however, it's hard to believe that the quality of a self-improver will ever be at the same level of a ex/mil-SAR boy.
The reason is simple - the Coasties just don't get the amount of jobs the mil boys do, Stornoway gets 50 - 75 jobs a year, the Lossie/Prestwick/Valley guys get >200. With the best will in the world, practice makes (closer to) perfect. Experience counts in this game.
That said, the Coasties have done some nasty boats, some more than many Mil SAR have - and it doesn't matter which side of the civvy fence you sit on - there'll be jobs which ended up a cluster.
The interesting issue will come when the civ's eventually end up taking the lion's share of overland SAR, there's plenty of threads which discuss yet another error of judgement. Less than 1% of jobs end with an incident/accident, but I bet that'll increase if/when the mil lose their grip on SAR and the ex-mil boys wither on the vine. I guess the flip side to my argument is that eventually the civvy side will grow the experience the military already have - but it seems a shame to this old beefer that HMG is happy to chuck the pool of excellence away for the cost of a few Tomahawks. (Time to give myself a painful slap and wake up to reality!)
I should add that I'm most certainly not anti-civ SAR at all, merely pro-military SAR, for lots of very good reasons, none of which are critical of the civs.