Shhhh..anynomous here, keep this to yourself, the skipper made a right fuss the other night. There we were in our bunks, throwing up the zzzzzz’a after a nice few pints and great T-bone steaks in a great little restaurant in Sines.

 

“John, John” shouts Dermot from his stateroom, “come up here a minute please”

“Ah... um...hic..hup” and other such burps, wheezes and groans is heard coming from John’s sleeping bag. “There in a minute, skip”.

Des jumps up, “Am I coming on or going off watch?”

“O my head” says John to Des, “that last pint must have been a bad one”

At this stage, Dermot is firing stuff from his stateroom back into the saloon, sleeping bag, gear bag, boots (smelly) pillow, small anchor (what?...his own anchor?...

“What’s up?” enquire Des and John.

“There’s a chemical reaction under my bunk” Dermot just manages to say

‘I knew it, I knew it’ thinks Des to himself, as a sock flies past him, ‘something was bound to go wrong’

“Interesting. Interesting indeed. That is a bad smell” says John.

“Interesting, my backside” says Dermot, “there’s some chemical reaction down there”

“Paddy, Stephen, get up, quickly” Des calls out, “there’s a problem with the hull”.

Up jumps the Doc, his survival instincts kicking into overdrive. “The hull” he says, “ what’s wrong with the hull?”

‘If it eat’s into the glassfibre’ thinks Des, ‘the bow will crumble like a wet towel’

“It’s the fluid for the chemical jax” proclaims the skipper, holding up a plastic container, smudged by the leaking deep blue fluid.

“Stand back, stand back” direct’s the Doc, muscling his way forward through the crew scrum-like formation at the door of the stateroom. “Let, me see the container” says Paddy, “And, get me my specs”

As Paddy analysed the contents of the jax fluid container, John merrily mumbled to himself the lines of a favourite childhood poem learnt at the Presentation Brothers College in Cobh;  ‘And still they gazed and still the wonder grew, that one small head could carry all he knew’.

“What are you muttering about” says Des to John “we’d better stay off the drink, if we survive this” he says, giving John a dig in the ribs.

“We’re okay, we’re okay, it’s only formaldhyde and methanol, it does’nt eat plastic” says the Doc.

“Phew” a collective sigh of relief goes up rom the now fully awake crew.

“We’d better get all the stained anchor ropes onto the dock and empty out the spilt fluid” says Dermot

So, picture it dear reader, Irelands’s finest, in varying stages of undress like the cast of ‘The Full Monty’, emptying chain and anchor warp through the forward hatch onto the marina pontoon. Mercifully, for the eyes of any sensitive ladies in Sines, this all happened at 4am, when these precious creatures are safely tucked up in their beds.

The Doc donned a pair of surgical gloves, the heavy skiing type, and emptied the remaining spilt fluid into our black bucket with a scoop made from a Dunnes Stores plastic milk container.

After hosing off and storing our ropes, we slipped our lines and made our way out of Sines, South towards Cape St Vincent.