Oh dear,sorry....

[Wansworth]

Remembering my youth in a slightly wine induced revelry...........crossing Lyme bay one night in my fifteen foot ocean crossing super yacht Without lights,insurance,lifesaving equipment,flares and safety harness was overtaken by a yacht .....equally not displaying lights?.........in 1972

 

[neil_s]

Battery was a bit low, no lights on - returning across the channel one night, approaching St Catherine's, 'There's something out there, I'm sure of it!' Turned on the nav lights and sure enough, lights suddenly appeared to port - it was a submarine!

 

[FlyingGoose]

Was it Russian

 

[johnalison]

Such irresponsibility. When we did our first 'long' crossing in 1980-something from Blackwater to Ijmuiden we were fully crewed with four adults on a 26-footer which boasted two adult berths. We had an engine, 2-stroke petrol with enough fuel for at least half the crossing. Plenty of lifejackets and lines, though only old-fashioned carabiner hooks, and I think that the masthead light was still working then. LW radio for forecasts, if we remembered, which wasn't often, and a Walker log. The RDF was useful if we could get it tuned in within six minutes, which wasn't often either. I sailed to get away from the phone, so no VHF, but we did have the dinghy half-inflated on deck. I hear that some of the better-off sailors are fitting Decca.

 

[Dan Tribe]

My first trip to Holland was 1976 in a Vivacity 650, Fambridge to Ijmuiden. Seagull outboard so no means of recharging battery so kept nav light use to a minimum. We had RDF but never got a reliable fix so relied on DR. We reckoned that heading East we would reach Europe somewhere. In those days there was ship called Volcano which burned waste chemicals, so that was a guide. At dawn we saw planes landing so assumed that was Schiphol, it was, but later we realised it could have easily been Rotterdam.

 

[newtothis]

What happened to the good old days of proper navigation? You'd sail south until you found a fishing boat to ask "où sommes-nous?"

 

[Dan Tribe]

What happened to the good old days of proper navigation? You'd sail south until you found a fishing boat to ask "où sommes-nous?"

Part of our preparation for the 1976 trip was learning to pronounce "Ijmuiden" so we could ask for directions.

 

[sailorman]

What happened to the good old days of proper navigation? You'd sail south until you found a fishing boat to ask "où sommes-nous?"

Did that work ok on the Southern North Sea

 

[sailorman]

Part of our preparation for the 1976 trip was learning to pronounce "Ijmuiden" so we could ask for directions.

That would depend on the Dutch region one came from
Imouda or Ijmuid-en

 

[sailorman]

Scheveningen was the tricky one

 

[john_morris_uk]

Did that work ok on the South China Sea

Corrected that for you...

 

[Quandary]

This is a drifting thread, right?
Our second ever crossing of the N Channel in our Achilles, about 1975 was in thick fog, we had an RDF (still have it somewhere) the lighthouses available were at least 20 miles distant and the null was about 5 degrees wide so we knew we were still in the sea somewhere with a cocked hat so big that it took an hour to cross it. Much later (in the 80s) we got a Decca, it was good while it worked. In our club two members set themselves up as an electronics repair business, they had a strange operating system, you gave your faulty instrument to them, they hid it somewhere, after 6 months to a year pleading for its return you bought a replacement from someone else, They still have my first Deccca. The second one was converted to GPS though not by them. I do not think their business was very profitable.

 

[johnalison]

What happened to the good old days of proper navigation? You'd sail south until you found a fishing boat to ask "où sommes-nous?"

I once published a formula for calculating distance-off in our SC magazine. It was based on the size of the fishing-boats one passed, down to zero, representing a man standing in the water with a fishing-rod.

 

[Daedelus]

First ever channel crossing on our own and switched on nav lights at 2am on departure and stern light had blown (it had been alright when checked early afternoon). In the dark undoing the fitting to get at the bulb and dropped one of the screws, bounce, splash, swear word. Mrs D said afterwards she heard the sequence of noises and (wisely) decided to stay below. Got it sorted and off we went.

Day we are due to come back and thick fog, Left it a day and still foggy but apparently clearing so decided to see if it would burn off. About 5miles out and a lovely blue sky and sunshine, sigh of relief until Mrs D says it looks a bit funny at the horizon. It did, it wasn't there; the fog was down to about 10metres high and stayed with us until we reached the shipping channels when it cleared to about 2miles viz, thank heavens and slowly cleared all the time.

 

[Praxinoscope]

Scheveningen was the tricky one

The difficulty of pronouncing Scheveningen was why the Dutch Resistance used it as part of their password, (Schave Scheveningen Schoenen), as Germans would almost certainly mis-pronounce these three words.

 

[SaltIre]

Went off exploring in our family gaff-rigged sailing dinghy with a mate, without submitting a passage plan to my parents. Mate's parents got a bit worried when he didn't reappear when they thought he might. Oops.
Better Drowned than Duffers.

 

[JumbleDuck]

Scheveningen was the tricky one

Being able to pronounce Scheveningen or Schiphol are both symptoms of COVID-19. If you can say Machynlleth it's just a cold.

 

[Praxinoscope]

Being able to pronounce Scheveningen or Schiphol are both symptoms of COVID-19. If you can say Machynlleth it's just a cold.

Dr Joseph Luns (the Dutch one time Secretary General of NATO) caused uproar in his native Netherlands when he made the comment that 'spoken Dutch is the simplest way of removing the tonsils without surgery' and I think he also made the suggestion that ' of all the animal sounds known to man Dutch is the closest to a language', but I may be wrong on this one.

 

[johnalison]

Dr Joseph Luns (the Dutch one time Secretary General of NATO) caused uproar in his native Netherlands when he made the comment that 'spoken Dutch is the simplest way of removing the tonsils without surgery' and I think he also made the suggestion that ' of all the animal sounds known to man Dutch is the closest to a language', but I may be wrong on this one.

Bill Bryson refers to Dutch in one of his books. He makes the observation that I have made: When the Dutch are talking among themselves, they make sounds that are vaguely similar to other languages, but when you ask one of them how to say a word they screw up their mouths into impossible shapes and an unintelligible gutteral sound comes out.

 

[Wansworth]

Luckily they speak almost perfect english?