Ooh, and another thing...
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What a night! The dice has conspired against me and a really vicious
little storm just blew through the anchorage! Oh, and every time I go online in
Europe with Vodafone roaming, it costs me £9.50 for 24hrs so I’m making
the most of it! More about that in a bit but I promised I’d credit the
winning skipper of the SB3 race on Sunday when I had his details and I’ve
just picked up an email from him. Just too late for the newsletter I’m
afraid but I don’t suppose he’d mind too much. I also hope he
doesn’t mind if I quote verbatim from his email as it’s typical of
several truly uplifting and encouraging responses to the newsletter and blogs. Hi Rob. First
i´m sorry about the english. Let me just interrupt there just so there’s no
misunderstanding here… I’m fairly certain that Luis is sorry for his English and not sorry about the
English as a nation generally! I´m the
guy who roll the dice for you in Cascais. I hope you do have a good trip to ??? Now my
friend, about the way you are doing the round the world, belive me, i listen
thousands of guys saying that they want to do it, that way, this way, around
the horn, to Panama, i don´t know, thousands of brilliant ways to do it,
but with a dice it was my first time. So the
only thing i can say is good luck,(sometimes you need luck in sea) and
i´m sure that in the next 2/3 years you will meet wonderfull places and
you will have story´s to tell in your book. Now you
have my email, and also my name (Luis Santos), if you need something email me. Good
Luck Luis And he’s right isn’t he… It’s going
to be a cracking two or three years. Particularly if I continue to have
experiences such as on Sunday when so many sailors far more accomplished than
me offered their support, their admiration and their best wishes.
Congratulations to Luis for his win on Sunday and thanks again to the Clube Naval de Cascais for their gracious
hospitality. Casino Estoril Yep, I went to the casino tonight armed with the dice and
fifty euros that I had every intention of going home with. It was a new
experience for me although I had a vague idea about how the roulette table
works from a childhood game I think. I wandered around for a while surprised to
see so many people at the slot machines and the… whatever the other
machines are. Literally hundreds of machines on two floors beneath a headache
inducing grid of lurid blue neon lights. It’s a chaotic spectacle of
colour and noise and yet, surprisingly, it’s completely joyless. Most
people were sitting alone hunched over the machines looking drained of all
hope. Those that were with friends spoke in hushed tones as if they alone had
discovered the winning formula that would win back the fortune they’d
spent the afternoon losing. I moved on to the roulette tables where an unlikely
mix of gamblers was assembled. A middle-aged Indian chap was littering the
table with 5 Euro chips with every turn of the wheel. Each time, he would turn
to his wife despondently making gestures that I took to be reassurance that his
extravagance would be rewarded. It wasn’t. There was a guy about my age,
maybe a bit younger studying the display where all the previous numbers are
documented. He clearly thought there would be a pattern and each time he would
place a small bet on Red or Black and very occasionally, on one of the three
sections relating to the high numbers, middle numbers or low numbers. He was
fretting, pacing, smoking and I felt quite sorry for him. There were others
too. An impossibly attractive young Portuguese girl with her surfer boyfriend,
a chain-smoking woman who watched the table intensely from afar only
occasionally moving forward to purposefully place a 10 Euro chip on one of the
three columns of numbers. And of course, there was an unbelievably handsome
chap who between each bet was walking away and throwing a little blue dice
– that was me! I started by simply using the dice to determine an
‘odds’ or ‘evens’ bet. I decided to play ten games each
time staking one chip of 5 Euros. The statisticians amongst you will not be
surprised to know then that I started with ten chips and until the last spin of
the wheel, I still had ten chips. I lost the last one and considered leaving
although I felt that the dice had not been sufficiently tested. I thought about
a controlled experiment where I would discard the dice and test my intuition
but decided instead to raise the stakes a little. I would place another ten
bets but this time, a one, two or three would relate to each of the three
columns, a four, five or six would relate to the low, middle or high numbers.
The first throw – a one; first column. The wheel spun and to my surprise
and delight, I won. Looking good! And that’s when it started going wrong.
The pay-out for each of these bets was double the stake so although the risks
were higher, so too were the winnings. I did win another couple of bets but
overall, after ten bets, I walked from the table with just six of my ten chips
remaining. The dice that is so influential to my global adventure had robbed me
of 20 Euros!
I left the casino to find that it had been raining and a
strong offshore wind had materialized in the short time I’d been squandering
the money I can’t afford to lose. You can see from the photograph that
the flag pole is bending in the wind and that’s when I started worrying
about Canasta. I rushed back
along the promenade and launched the dinghy although I could now see that Canasta hadn’t dragged the anchor as
I feared she might. You might recall that my outboard motor was temperamental
since it’s ducking on Sunday. Well it doesn’t work at all now
despite my best efforts this afternoon to service it and as such, I had to row
back to the boat in a howling wind. Once aboard, I switched the instruments on
to discover that thirty knot gusts of wind were whipping Canasta around on her anchor chain and
furiously rattling the halyards against the mast. As I write though, the storm has
passed and the wind is now blowing a gentle four knots although I’ve just
checked the forecast and it’s still giving strong wind warnings for the I re-read today’s newsletter after I’d sent it
and wondered if I’d perhaps been a little harsh on this seaside town. It
was once good enough for Kings and the aristocracy so who was I to call it
‘false’ or ‘defaced’? It is after all ‘just my
opinion’ but it is an opinion that will not be shared by the tourist
brochures and for that I make no apology. So maybe I’ll be setting sail for I’ll keep you posted… Bee Rob Clark W2N Global Ltd. +44 (0)7967 661157
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