It was funny or was it
By Pintal
We had just delivered the boat to Bluffers Park for the LORC East End Regatta. The Hamilton Harbour Serious Drinkers and Sailors Association were settling in for a few pre race drinks, having finished with race tactics (be first across the line) and the girls weren’t to show up till the morning, I picked up a copy of Reeds. Unfortunately there are a lot of you that don’t know what Reeds is, it’s a publication that is a Nautical Almanac, it also has a host of marine info including how to deliver a baby at sea.. If you sail or race in tidal waters you have to know what it is, in order to go the right way some of the time. This was an older version 1993 and I opened up the shapes and signals section and fired out a few testers to the lads. They were met by more than the odd blank stare. Then I was asked a few and got half of them wrong. There was a time I knew them all backwards.
When I did my DoT Yachtmaster we were told the cautionary tale, of a minesweeper coming up the Thames estuary one dirty night in the 1930's, on observing a series of lights the officer on watch called for the signals book, at that point they were mowed down by the ship with the lights
I learnt my lights in Dublin and practiced crossing the Irish Sea, where you might see the odd ferry. Then I moved to Cowes and I was astounded on my first night watch across to France, in three hours, 56 ships to starboard and 10 to port. Yes, when you need to know your shapes and signals its to late to start looking for the book, anyway its probably in the car or garage with all the other useful gear the skipper left behind.
Then we moved on from lights to the flags, all hanging from the ceiling and in order as well. They of course all have a meaning as well as a phonetic name and morse code. Well the crew now all know what flag Romeo stands for.
Seriously though if we sail outside the breakwater, in the Harbour or the lake one should have a rudimentary knowledge of the International Collisions at Sea, including the lights and shapes and the international code flags and their meanings, and as they say at the Board of Trade inquiry the Master is responsible.
So should you be worried if you see two vertical red lights and a green light, change to two vertical red lights with a lower white light on either side?
Pintal:- Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. August 1999
