cruising

PC 432 Hope as Always (Continued)

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There’s never enough time to catch up with everyone in the Hope Café so I make an effort to see Sami and Mo particularly. Anyone else is a bonus! Sami and his partner Lisa get a coffee, decline some pancakes that Libby is trying to get rid of, and join me at one of the bigger tables.

“You’re looking well, Richard! Must be all that ‘freezing-your-b*****ks-off’ in that CryoBright place; that and the hot yoga you’re addicted to!”

“Hello you two! Good to see you both and yes, Sami, not a crime to be addicted to something, surely! And I have lengthened my time in the cold chamber to the maximum they recommend, 5 minutes. Got carried away last Wednesday, singing along with the music in my headphones. Came out and found I had an audience! Sounds travel!!”

“You’ve sailed thousands of miles, Richard, so you’d have been shocked when those two ships collided in the North Sea. (Ed. On 10th March) How is it possible these days?”

“Ah! Sami, you, like all the news releases, talk of how the two ships ‘collided’ or that they ‘crashed into each other’, inferring both were to blame. I really don’t think it could be the fault of the oil tanker MV Stena Immaculate, sadly no longer immaculate, peacefully at anchor, displaying all the appropriate signage and one of eight other large tankers and container ships at anchor off the Humber Estuary. At anchor you hoist a large black ball in the fore part of the ship; at night you additionally need an all-round white light.”

The MV Stena Immaculate with a large hole on her port side

“Do you need to have a human being on ‘anchor watch’? I read that the Portuguese-registered container ship, MV Solong (Note 1), was steaming south off the East Yorkshire coast at its full speed of 16kts when it rammed the MV Stena Immaculate. The impact caused the Stena Immaculate to be displaced some 200 metres. The Solong’s gross tonnage was 7852 and momentum, if I remember my mathematics, is mass multiplied by speed. What’s that expression? ‘What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?’

“It’s brought to mind that time in Cyprus, described in PC 231 ‘Ropes, Warps and Sheets’ from May 2021, when I was part of the crew sailing from Akrotiri to Dhekelia, and we anchored off the beach. The skipper didn’t leave anyone on board as he judged it safe. But there was a local wind that blew in the late morning. Someone alerted the skipper as he was having his eggs & bacon …. read the postcard.

A still from some Super 8 cinefilm of Highlight on the beach

In the same postcard I wrote about skippering St Barbara IV, a Nicholson 43, from Liverpool to Oban on the west coast of Scotland, years later. A day or so after visiting the Isle of Man, we anchored off the little village of Lamlash on the eastern side of the Isle of Arran. It wasn’t exactly sheltered from the northeast and when the wind shifted in the middle of the night, the chap on watch woke me, so I could assess the situation; it was 0310. We started the engine, raised the anchor and motored across to shelter in the lee of Holy Isle.

To those of us who sail, Sami, it’s unbelievable that this could happen, given radar and watch-keeper systems. Clearly a human error, ultimately by the captain of the Solong, who has now been charged with Gross Negligence Manslaughter, as one crewman sadly died. I read that the Solong had travelled through this area of the North Sea three times in the last month. However, the description of the collision reminded me of one of those regular reasons people say when they have a car accident and fill out the claim form: “The lamppost just jumped into the road.” (See PS)

“On to more local issues, I am glad I accepted the compensation offered by the Post Office last year, as some of my colleagues are still waiting. Beggars’ belief how bureaucrats can be so obstructionist! (See PC 420 Contentious Issues in the UK for 2025)”

“You’ve come a long way in 4 years, Sami, and it’s been a delight to see you and Lisa happy and excited about life. You know my daughter bought her late maternal grandmother’s wreck of a house and has spent the last 7 months working on it? Well, it’s now habitable enough and they move in tomorrow; still a great deal of work to do but the financial pot is empty and needs to be refilled.”

“You’re going to tell me a story of some blunder or other?

“I am, Sami, as it reinforces the wonderful adage if you’re a DIY enthusiast, ‘measure twice, cut once.’ The builder who’s been responsible for most of the work is a lovely chap and a carpenter by trade, so he of all people should follow the traditional advice. I was at the house a couple of weeks ago and thought that a new balustrade looked too low for safety. I mentioned it to my son-in-law Sam, took a photograph and reinforced my thought by WhatsApp when I got home.

Sam mentioned it to the builder who protested that it was absolutely fine. Then a day later he quietly admitted he’d measure the height from one floor level and not the other, a difference of 10cms. He’s going to have to remake it from scratch!”

“That extra 10cms could make the difference between a boisterous boy going over the top or not! Listen, we know you’re off to Rio but when you come back, can we find a date for you to come and have some supper with us? After Easter maybe?”

“That will be delightful (See PCs 329 & 330 ‘Supper with Sami’ April 2023 when they came to us). Why don’t you send us some options and we can pencil something in. And now I need to get going ….. lovely to see you both …..”

This conversation was over a week ago as we are now in Barra da Tijuca, a western suburb of Rio de Janeiro!!

View from our AirBnB apartment

Richard 28th March 2025

Rio de Janeiro

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PS The still smouldering MV Solong has been towed to the Scottish port of Aberdeen, arriving yesterday.

Note 1There’s a joke here somewhere: ‘so long, farewell …..’ ???? (The Sound of Music?)

PC 426 It’s a Fine Line ….

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I was going to scribble how it’s often a fine line between success and failure, between life and death …… but I thought I would consult my Oxford Illustrated Dictionary and see what it says about ‘line’. Wow! Over a column of the three-columns-to-a-page layout devoted to the word ‘line’.

Most would immediately understand it is a noun and that it joins two points. We have telegraph and power lines; lines marking the boundaries of, for instance, a tennis court; life lines on the palm of your hand; lines that connect points having common property, like an isobar, or the Equator or lines of longitude or latitude; lines to be learned by actors, as opposed to reading between the lines to discover a meaning not obvious or expressed; a line of poetry remembered years later; somewhere to hang your washing, the clothes line; words to be written out as a school punishment; naval ships in formation are often line astern or line abreast;

tram lines in cities or railway lines criss-crossing the country; in Rugby Union forwards form a line to receive the ball from the touchline, a ‘line out’. As a verb, troops could line the streets for ceremonial occasions; you could line a drawer with paper or you could line your stomach, anticipating drinking too much alcohol!

My own fine line, my brush with death in 1991, remains very clear today. As a passenger (in car A in diagram) being driven into Canberra, Australia during the rush hour, traffic was heavy in both directions. Suddenly we were aware of a car (car B) overtaking the oncoming traffic, coming at us head-on. There was nowhere to go. My friend decided to swing right, although instinctively left would have been the better option!

The oncoming car swung to their right; a collision seemed inevitable. The only touch was the paintwork on the passenger-side wing mirror; a very fine line indeed.

Writing about lines, fine or not, remined me of a question I often asked my clients in their first coaching session. I would draw nine dots on a piece of paper, thus:

then ask them to join them up, using four straight lines, without taking their pencil off the paper. We habitually see things that aren’t necessarily there, because it gives us a comfortable feel, recognition of the familiar. I recall that about 25% of my clients were successful. Trump is thinking ‘outside of the box’ with his ideas about Gaza – makes me wonder whether he would be in the 25% or not?

Last weekend in Europe we had the second round of the Six Nations (Note 1) Rugby Union Competition. England were playing France; it was a very good game to watch and the lead changed hands throughout, although a last minute try by England meant we won 26 points to 25 …. a fine line. (Note 2)

Words which mean the same are collectively called synonyms, like ask, question or inquire, or beautiful, gorgeous and dazzling. You can also have a phrasal synonym, like ‘fine line’ and ‘hair’s breadth’. Typically a hair strand is between 0.03mm and 0.08mm in diameter; one nominal value often chosen is 75µm. Such measures can be found in many cultures; for instance in the Burmese system of Long Measure a tshan khyee, the smallest unit is literally a ‘hair’s breadth’.

A straight line between two points can be at any angle, but geometrically graphs always have at least two axes, one horizontal and one vertical. My pedantic nature is offended if something isn’t level, horizontal or vertical. Sometimes it’s a fine line, even half a degree or so. When we moved into our apartment in Amber House after its conversion in 2012, a couple of light switches were not straight; given the availability of spirit levels, it was a good example of poor workmanship.  

When sailing, if the wind is coming from the direction you want to go in, you have to ‘beat’, with the sails as flat as possible. It’s a very fine line to steer the yacht at its optimum; too much into the wind and sails start being back-winded; too far off the wind and the yacht heels so much, reducing the efficiency of the sail area. When you get it right, it’s as if the yacht ‘lifts its skirt and flies’; yachts are always female by tradition so this expression should be safe in this sensitive world.

For James Howells it’s still a fine line between success and abject misery! In Wales in 2013 he had a bitcoin wallet worth £4 million; its password was stored on his hard drive. His girlfriend, possibly ex by now (?), threw out the hard drive with some rubbish, presumably without knowing what it was. Somewhere under a mountain of household waste in some council refuse tip is a hard drive which, if retrieved, could unlock, at current bitcoin value, about a billion pounds sterling. He’s even offered the council millions if he’s allowed to successfully search for it, so far without success. 

The polarisation of everything, including politics, views about this and that, personal opinions, is making society more fractious, the line between acceptable and unacceptable extremely thin, like living on a knife-edge. With the increase in false news stories and conspiracy theories, it’s surely time for us all to apply good old fashioned common sense and move towards the centre.  

David Lammy the UK Government’s Foreign Secretary: “There’s a fine line, as you know, between free speech and hate speech.” Maybe I could add that it’s also a fine line between love and hate, other extremes. So, let’s concentrate on ‘Love’, particularly on this romantic day?

Richard St Valantine’s Day 2025

Hove

www.postcardscribles.co.uk

PS Last Summer, a tree near my brother-in-law’s apartment in Estoril Portugal looked as though it could do with about one third taken off it. Someone asked whether that should be from the top or the bottom. (Just think about that?)

Note 1 The six nations comprise England, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy and Ireland

Note 2 The previous weekend Ireland had beaten England 27-22.