Yachting Monthly's Confessions by Paul Gelder

Author:Paul Gelder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Lighting-up time

Early on, we very nearly hit the Channel One buoy in the dark and in response its light flashed on. Just a slight delay with lighting up time.

Not so the next problem, which came trundling and clanking out of the mist and murk close by. No chance of missing this one—a veritable Piccadilly Circus of lights, twinkling and flashing in all directions. What should we do? What was it? Nothing in book or memory matched this lot: reds, whites, greens in profusion, like a voyaging disco-and-bingo hall for off-duty pilots.

There was just something about the shape, a hulking, heavy-shouldered ship, menacing.

‘I think,’ I said hesitantly, ‘we’ll go well around this. It may be towing something.’

We did and it was. About half a mile astern of it came a huge, nearly submerged, entirely blacked-out ‘thing’. Round, smooth, featureless. An oil tank? A submarine? Thoughts of the length of steel cable twanging out in the dark gave us the shivers.

Never again, I said. However weird or complex the lights, I’m going to be able to say, right off, first glance, ‘It’s a raft-up, having a party’, or ‘It’s an unlit fisherman smoking a pipe.’ That sort of thing.

In pursuance of this high ideal, I was determined to look out for anything really interesting or unusual on one of our many ferry trips to France, a safe enough place from which to make mistakes.

Sitting in the car, on the quayside, I watched a huge P & O ferry inch its way into a berth against a gale which had every shroud and halyard in Portsmouth shrieking and banging. Slowly the ferry strained against its springs and came to a halt, at which instant up flashed a truly novel set of masthead lights. Whites over reds, reds over greens, two orange (orange?) laterals, all kinds of things.

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