For many years I have kept a hand-written journal and I am now on Journal XLI started in September last year. I have evolved a fairly rigid format of one A5 page per journal entry but my writing is small so I cram 15 words onto a line and 40 lines onto a page…600 words in all. This compares with the 900 words in my typewritten weblogs. So far this year I have made twenty-eight journal entries…about eight a month. To give you the flavour of this little corner of my regular literary output here is the journal entry I wrote at The Ship Inn yesterday afternoon at five o’clock.
‘Three more weblogs and the first volume is ready for posting on my website as a pdf file costing £6.99. It will be interesting to see if there are any takers. Several little pockets of good news. Vemara is now on Lochins Moorings so it is convenient for Martin and David who live on Fishmarket Road [just across The Salts a few hundred yards away].
When the crane comes I was promised a lift-out for my mast if I wanted it…for a tenner. It certainly needs to be worked on but I’m pretty worried about getting it all back again in the right order…and there is also several hundred pounds worth of rigging replacement. Today I declared the boat to be 27-foot long and paid two months mooring fees to The Rye Partnership. The cost is £71 per month and should be recoverable from Rother District Council. The figure they need is £213.40 per quarter plus harbour dues.
The other piece of good news is that I had Marie Appelquist on the phone and she is happy to go ahead with the JAK Blancolån without a guarantor but needs a temporary Swedish address…to be swapped out for my Lund address once I have registered and am resident in Sweden. I may still have to explain about my dispute with CSN [Sweden’s Student Loans Agency] so we are not home and dry yet but this is a significant concession that brings me closer.
Roud couldn’t resist some more nastiness even when he was getting rid of me…as he wanted. To me he said, ‘Berni was here this morning. She said you owe her £ 2000. Pay your debts!’ It then transpired that he had also successfully persuaded Peter Butler to muck me about by telling him that I had told Taxi Man John he had been ‘inside for arson’. As it happened it didn’t work as Kevin…who has also been on the receiving end of Roud’s wicked ways…volunteered to come with me when I moved the boat. Peter had decided he didn’t want to walk back from Lochins so went off to get his bike…but then didn’t come back when Roud sabotaged things. I phoned Peter when I got round to Lochins and got no answer and then tried later and found out why he had not returned.
In the river opposite Derek Phillips Boatyard there was a sailing boat keeping right over on my side of the river. I assumed he was going to turn right into a mooring and cut across in front of me. But he held his course as I attempted to go past him on the inside…my port to his port. For a few moments he turned one way to avoid a collision and I turned the same way. Then I made a sharp sixty-degree turn to port across his bow so we passed starboard to starboard. It was close. Indeed Kevin told me afterwards he thought we were going to hit.
Anyway as we passed I saw it was a French visitor with four young lads aboard and a very frightened lad on the tiller. It was only afterwards that the thought struck me that they might have been under sail…in which case I was at fault. It is almost unheard of for anybody to sail up Rock Channel nowadays so the thought had never crossed my mind. Gilbert used to do it as a party piece if the wind was right and Alec Bradley did it because he had no engine. But the French don’t have inboard engines like the English…for tax reasons…and only have little outboards.’
And there my journal entry ended. But I was curious to find out what had happened. So on leaving The Ship Inn I went along to The Strand to have a word with the young French mariners. I met them just coming off their boat. I apologised profusely and told them how embarrassed I was to have greeted them in so rude a manner when they were visitors to my town and my country. They were much relieved and we shook hands and chatted happily away in our respective bad French (me) and poor English (them). At least now they will go off with a good impression of England and the English. But it was something of a ploy to find out what I wanted to know…and I did.
It turned out that they had been under engine and were indeed at fault. But worse than this was the fact that none of them had any idea about the rules of the road. They thought…quite reasonably unless you think it through…that because the English drive their cars on the left they must also drive their boats on the left. Whoops! I explained to them that this is not the case. Even the Aussies and the South Africans follow international rules of the sea and pass port to port as if driving on the right-hand side of the water road.
Of course racing under sail is a different kettle of fish with its own rules. But for ordinary folks out for a jolly the only exception to the right-side rule is that Steam gives way to Sail. But this can be hard to ascertain until you are close enough to crash into each other...and that is a little too late. So the de facto rule is that you get out of the way of anything…and particularly anything that is bigger than you. Vemara’s nine tons would have made a very nasty mess of their 24-foot fibreglass yacht. So on all counts the French were in the wrong.