96 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com NOVEMBER 2015
THE CONFESSIONAL
OWN UP TO YOUR SAILING SINS
The confession of the
month wins a floating
Standard Horizon
handheld VHF radio worth £140
PLUS an original Bill Caldwell cartoon
WIN
POST Confessions,
Yachting Monthly,
Blue Fin Building,
110 Southwark Street,
London SE1 0SU
EMAIL
[email protected]
Please send us your confessions
in less than 200 wordsNo salt please,
we’re British!
CONFESSION
OF THE MONTH
By Peter Hoggins
My wife loves sailing, but
she’ll do anything to avoid
getting things salty.
In a quiet anchorage
in Florida, I watched with
some interest as a chap
on a neighbouring yacht
fl ung a couple of lifejackets
into his tiny infl atable
dinghy, lifted up a large and
obviously heavy battery
and took ‘one giant step’
into the tender... Big splash,
lifejackets blowing away in the breeze and,
for a few seconds, a bit of physics where
the equation ‘weight of man plus battery is
less than Archimedean upthrust plus frantic
thrashing’ held true.
‘HE-gurgle-LP!’ he cried.
Quick as a fl ash, I was across to him in our
dinghy and, grabbing a fl ailing arm, hauled
him alongside.
‘Thanks-gurgle-buddy!’ he gasped, trying
to haul himself into the boat.
‘Stop right there!’ I cried, thinking of the
amount of nasty brown salty water with
which he would swamp me. ‘If you climb in
we might as well both be dead.’
I dragged him back to his boat and, after
checking he was OK, returned to my wife.
‘My hero!’ she cried.
‘Even better,’ I leered. ‘Not a drop of salty
water in the dinghy.’
She smiled knowingly. ‘I wouldn’t care.’
So that’s how it works!
By Callum Beaton
We have a crew member (we’ll call him Darren
here) who has a fascination with gadgetry.
Darren was particularly interested in our
automatic bilge pump, which was not only
silent in operation but, seemingly, never
discharged anything. After every sailing trip,
the manual override button was diligently
pressed, though there was no visible discharge
over the side – or so we though.
On a great day’s sailing, particularly marked
by a large pod of dolphins following us, we had
become conscious of the cabin fl oor becoming
slippery, accompanied by an increasing smell
of diesel. Having had a recent engine service
we suspected that a gasket had been refi tted
incorrectly. On each successive tack, as the
yacht came level, the order came from Darren
to use the override switch to clear the bilge.Back in harbour, we tidied
up before going ashore in the
RIB. ‘Just press the switch on
the bilge pump,’ was the fi nal
instruction... swiftly followed
by the question, ‘Why is there
diesel in the RIB’?
So we now know the bilge
pump works and where it
discharges, and at least we
didn’t pollute the harbour!Not so skipperoo
By Brian Whelan
It was the day after the
Australian bicentennial, 27
January 1988, and I and my
crew of Irish twenty-somethings,
like everyone on Hamilton Island in the
Whitsundays that day, were feeling delicate.
It had been an idyllic cruise on which fi ve
landlubbers had learned many important
lessons in seamanship, such as never hanging
out washing in or near a port and addressing
me properly as ‘Skipper’ or ‘Skipperoo’.
We had decided to step ashore for a
restorative fry-up, but the battery was low
and it needed at least 30 minutes’ engine
running to charge it. Carl, our ‘morale offi cer’
and teetotaller, offered to stay on board while
the engine was running. I set the revs at a
respectable 2,000 and we staggered to town.
The breakfast went some way to restoring
my sobriety, but nothing like the shock of
coming back an hour later to fi nd our arm of
the marina pontoon, with 24 yachts moored to
it, wedged up against the harbour wall.
It seems some fool had been charging his
batteries with the engine in gear! It wasn’t
‘Skipperoo’ I was called that day.8LI/M[MTVST*IEXLIVMRK 4VSTIPPIV
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