Hello from Stromboli
Stromboli comes home
John and Sue Chadwick
Sat 16 Jun 2007 20:07
We're just under 400 miles to go and the GPS says that we should arrive sometime late on Tuesday evening (but this depends on us maintaining our current speed and course so don't go and order up the Red Arrows just yet!). There's two or three Lows in the offing - so we need to be a little canny over the next few days.
This morning I was reflecting over our ship encounter the other night, when American implacability met British compliance and, from us, recfeived a meek, 'Roger that, sir, we'll turn to Starboard'. After which we had to go all round the town 'giving way' to this blasted steam ship (non-initiates should know that, on the high seas at least, the convention is that steam gives way to sail.) In this single statement (and subsequent maneuver) had we not, by some intuitive process, merely mirrored Britain's current position on American foreign policy? How much more fulfilling the meeting might have been, I now conjecture, if we had the confidence to brash it out - as, say, might a Caribbean-manned sailing yacht:
'Hey, yo jivin' me, man? Watch you mean - go round? We's a sailin' ship, Dude! You got that? Ah repeat. A Sail - 'in - Ship and we's no give way to no motor vessel. No Sir! You gotcha ears on over there Sylvester? We's holdin' course, bro.'
How often it is, that only after the event, one sees clearly what one should have said and how one should have said it, at the time. (I don't want you to think that this incident has left a mark or is grating or anything).
On these longish trips one of the conundrums one faces is what to do with domestic rubbish (being how there's only so much space to store it). On Stromboli- and I accept that not everyone will see eye to eye with our policy - we retain until port, all plastics and non-degradable stuff. From 12 miles offshore we discard organic food waste. Once we're away from the continental shelves (depth typically 3 miles) we deep-six cans and glass bottles. Soft drink cans have become something of speciality. Mindful that when a can settles on the sea bed it might have a secondary use for, say, a wondering whelk ('hallo', he says, 'here's a handy little hideout for Wendy and the three Wee Willies. Shame there's only one door'). Accordingly each jettisoned can has had rows of windows and doors inserted by dint of a marlin spike. The mate even made a pair of patio doors in one can.
As you can perhaps deduce, once in a while, time can hang a trifle heavy out here……
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