Yet another maintenance day. What is the world corning to?
We are once again all on our ownsome, or ‘proceeding independently’ as these Naval chaps put it, with no flying or other silly evolutions to mar the peace and contentment of the eastern Atlantic Ocean. We are sailing down the west coast of Africa, and will be passing through the Canary Islands in the early part of the afternoon, though not close enough to see any of them in any detail.
Having seen white legs in abundance yesterday, and bearing in mind that the sun was very hot yesterday (today is rather overcast, though still warm, of course), there are a hell of a lot of bright pink legs about the place today, the property of people who very definitely overdid the sun-worshipping bit yesterday. I’m quite glad I kept a low profile, looking at the way some people are limping about the place. I’m limping as well, of course, but that’s the sandals, which I can cure simply by taking them off.
I have actually just been up on deck, where it is bright, though not really sunny, and with quite a chill wind blowing, and I can confirm that though we are now within about twelve miles of the Canaries, and passing between Gran Canaria and Tenerife, in fact, there is absolutely nothing to be seen, apart from the odd sea bird and a couple of merchant ships proceeding about their lawful occasions, as I believe the correct legal term has it.
We had a wee bit of excitement this afternoon when the tannoy suddenly clamoured into life to announce ‘Man Overboard’.
Now, if that had happened two weeks ago at Portland, it would have been an exercise, as all ‘real’ pipes were prefixed by the word ‘Safeguard’. Today, however, it was clearly for real, and the next thing I heard was ‘Away Seaboat, away Seaboat’, closely followed by ‘Action the SAR helicopter. Hands to Flying Stations. Clear the Flight Deck of all non-essential personnel’, while the ship’s speed increased quite perceptibly and she started to turn about. The procedure for the recovery of a man overboard is fairly simple. We have a permanent man overboard sentry, who works on the Quarterdeck, and whose sole job in life is to watch the wake of the ship and, if he sees anyone in the water, to release a lifebelt, which has a water-activated light on it. If the man who has fallen in can get to the lifebelt, all well and good, but even if he can’t, by getting the lifebelt into the water as soon as possible, we have a very good idea of the area where we should start looking.
Only after he has released the lifebelt does he alert the bridge. The delay doesn’t matter, because the first thing the ship will do is nothing. For obvious reasons, the last thing you want is for the ship to immediately make a screaming Jesus turn and mow the guy down.
So, it steams away, and then commences manoeuvre called a Williamson’s Turn, which basically means turning left thirty degrees and steadying the ship for a short period of time (I think it’s about thirty seconds), then turning right onto the reciprocal of the original heading. So, if the ship was heading 180, it would turn initially onto 150, then right onto 360.
The seaboat, in this case (and it would usually be the case) was launched before the turn started, in order to reach the man as quickly as possible – the danger of sharks or other aquatic nasties appearing are one problem, but a rather more real danger is that he might drown, having been injured or just winded by his fall into the sea: he fell from the Flight Deck, which is a drop of 58 feet. The helicopter was prepared simply as a back-up in case the seaboat couldn’t find him.
Happily in this case, the helicopter was not required, as the seaboat reached the victim only a matter of four minutes after he went in. He was an AEM named Anderson, and during a game of football on the Flight Deck he had been running so fast after the ball that when the edge of the Flight Deck loomed up, he simply couldn’t stop and fell over fifty feet into a fairly rough sea. But he did bring the ball back with him.
ITV sprang into action this evening with the first of a whole string of episodes of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ at 1800, to be closely followed after dinner at 2100 by ‘The Wild Geese’, both of which I watched. The dinner I ate.
When the film finished, I went out onto the Quarterdeck to have a look round.
A very dark, black night, with not another ship in sight anywhere, which is I suppose not all that surprising, as we are well away from any of the normal trade or trans-ocean routes at the moment. By the same token, we are so far out from the coast of Africa that telling you where we are passing is largely useless, but I suppose if you draw a line west from the middle of the Sahara, using a thick pencil on a small map, we are somewhere on it.
What was of interest, though, was the amount of phosphorescence in the wake of the ship, and passing down both sides of us. It reminded me very much of the most peculiar phenomena we saw in the Indian Ocean when I was on Tidepool back in 1978, though these were on a very much smaller scale, just appearing like tiny pinpoints of light, blue-green and quite bright, tumbling in the disturbed water behind the ship. Quite beautiful.