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WRITING IS FUN

Ted Polet

1970s SHIPPING NEWS

2 - mv Oostkerk, 150 miles SW of Ushant

After our departure from London we set out into the Channel, around the North and South Forelands, passing Cap Gris Nez, turning west towards Ushant, then south-west into the Biscay Bay. The morning after rounding Ushant I joined the First Mate's watch at 4am, a calm sea and tiny wind wavelets on slow westerly rollers making us roll sleepily. Around us were clusters of small fishing boats, which as usual had found the best shoals of fish slap in the middle of the shipping lane.

Greasing the rigging, flesh hooks and chipping rust

For some reason the First Mate and I never got on in that ship. My company must have been too much for a man of his considerable stature. After a few watches he got tired of my talking back and he sent me to the boatswain to assist in the menial job of greasing the running rigging with an evil mixture of grease, old engine oil, fine clay and other muck, which you were supposed to apply to the thick steel running wires of the cargo winches with your bare hands and a wad of cotton waste. If you were unlucky you'd cut your hands on tiny sharp wires sticking up out of the 3/4 inch wire rope. We didn't call them 'flesh hooks' for nothing, and always watched carefully where we put our hands.

One thing I got very good at during that trip was chipping rust. A chipping hammer is a sharply pointed hammer with a short handle, used to tap the rust and scale out of the corrosion pits in a steel surface. The 'Oostkerk' was a rusty old vessel and my first job was to chip the top of the bulwarks along the accommodation gangway to starboard. The profiled flat steel strip was nearly rusted through in places, which meant one had to wield the hammer with some care to avoid chipping right through it. After chipping came the steel wire brush, then a brush of red lead. At the end of that trip my right arm had grown to nearly twice the thickness of the other.

Watchkeeping at sea

After a few days, luckily I was put in the Second Mate's watch, the afternoon watch (12 to 4). He was a good man who taught me the rudiments of watchkeeping at sea. Keeping the lookout, taking bearings on ships crossing our course, coastal navigation, and last but not least shooting the three o'clock sun. As soon as the sun's azimuth had progressed over 30 degrees from the south, an observation could be made.

This entailed lowering the sun on to the horizon using a sextant, then 'roll' it back and forth till the lower edge touched the horizon exactly, call 'stop' and start counting the seconds (twenty-and-one, twenty-and-two...) till you reached the chronometer in the chartroom. Read this, jot down the time, then subtract the seconds counted from your observation. Next calculate GMT from the observed time and start the calculation, applying corrections from the Almanac, then write down and add up a pile of numbers on a sheet of paper, each with 5 decimals looked up in the logarithm tables. This process needs to be trained to perfection to ensure an accurate result: a position line in the chart, on which the ship is situated.

Initially it cost me half an hour, but eventually it became a race against the Second's lightning speed of 6 minutes. And meanwhile you keep a lookout, which is why the calculation was always done at the wheelhouse windows. Once during that process the Second cursed fluently: '#$%*, those d**n f***ing white ships.' Suddenly from behind one of the masts a white ghost had appeared, a white-painted and threrfore nigh-on invisible refrigrated fruit carrier sitting on a contrary course not 6 miles straight ahead. We changed course a few degrees to starboard to get out of his way.

Phoney Feet

In the 'Oostkerk' there was a bosun's mate who spoke with an unfortunate lisp, and answered to the name of Len. It was whispered that Len owned a block of houses in Rotterdam south of the river, and only went to sea for fun, but I never got to the bottom of that. He had a shock of dirty red hair streaked with grey and invariably was dressed in the filthiest boiler suit you can imagine, full of rents and blotched with rust, grease and red lead. One morning during coffee at 10, Len and the boatswain were having an animated chat. Len repeatedly mentioned something sounding like 'Phoney Feet', and for the life of me I couldn't make out what he meant. Until I understood the culprit was his lisp... he was referring to a First Mate he had sailed with, who was nicknamed 'Porno Pete', as the man never joined a ship without a box of dubious magazines containing pictures of scantily clad young ladies...

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