No Sea Room -and other things ROCKS, SHALLOWS or obstructing lines reduced the lifeboats' manoeuvring room in four of the services (described briefly below) for which medals for gallantry were presented at the Royal Festival Hall in May last year; and those manoeuvres had to be made in gale or storm force winds and high seas. For Coxswain/Mechanic Charles Bowry, then of Sheerness but now at Portpatrick, and Coxswain/Mechanic Richard Hawkins of Great Yarmouth and Gorleston it was shallow water over sandbanks which restricted their room; for Coxswain/Mechanic Ian Johnson of Troon it was the anchor cables of a dredger in danger of being driven on to a lee shore; for Coxswain/Mechanic Malcolm MacDonald it was the dangerous rocks among which a motor fishing vessel had gone aground.

The crowded day of the 1981 annual presentations of awards over, there was the opportunity the next morning, before everyone dispersed, for these four medallists to talk over their experiences with Lt-Cdr Roy Portchmouth, staff inspector (operational developments, trials and sea training). As we tune in.

Coxswain Ian Johnson is talking about the wild September afternoon when Troon lifeboat went to the help of the dredger . . . .

Coxswain/Mechanic Ian Johnson, Troon: It was blowing west north west force 9 to 10 when we left harbour that day and we had a bit of difficulty getting through the heavy water at the pier entrance.

Then on the way across to Holland I, three and a half miles away, we had to go over shallow banks and we were laid over a couple of times. When we got to the dredger she was in the surf line and in that wind and sea she wasn't going to give us very much of a lee. The main problem in getting close was caused by her anchor cables at bow and stern. Altogether she had five anchors out: the main stern anchor, an anchor from each quarter and an anchor from each bow, but in fact her full weight was being taken on the starboard quarter anchor and the other cables were all slack. The crew were gathered in a control cabin on the starboard bow because the rest of the dredger was being swept by the seas. I had to stand off a wee minute and think just exactly what was going to be done. We have a 44ft Waveney lifeboat and with her speed and quick response the easiest way of getting the crew off would be to take off one man at a time from the shoulder. The greatest danger was the bow anchor wire. We had to go in at a slight angle to keep it clear of our propellers, but we got one man off. By this time the dredger was rising and falling 12 to 15 feet and we came down pretty heavily on one of her stanchions to bounce back off again. After that we managed to take three more off, but when the fifth man was asked to jump he froze, so he was literally just grabbed by the scruff of the neck and hauled aboard. In that wind and sea I wasn't going to take the chance of going back across the same shallows I had come over on the way out, so I set my course to seaward to clear the heavy surf.

Coming back to harbour full power was required to get through the breakers.

And that was about it.

Lt-Cdr Roy Portchmouth: So your manoeuvring problem wasn't really all that great except for the anchor wires? Johnson: She was only holding on the one quarter anchor. That was our biggest danger. The whole weight of the dredger, and she was something like 540 tons, was hanging on this one wire and in the back of my mind was 'Is that wire going to hold, or are we going to be involved?' Because if that wire had parted we should definitely have been in a little bit of a sticky situation. The dredger would have carried across and we would have got the bow wire right up in our propellers.

Portchmouth: Charlie, have you had experience of trying to go alongside a casualty where your freedom of action is very restricted?Coxswain/Mechanic Charles Bowry, Sheerness: I got involved with a yacht.

It was blowing about force 9 and snowing.

She had missed the fairway going up the Medway, shot out of the fairway, gone through a lot of yacht moorings and just stuck her feet down right on top of a wreck.* And the first we saw of her was a little lamp flashing SOS. We have a Waveney at Sheerness and the Waveneys have so much power and are so manoeuvrable that I don't really think it is the confined space that you worry about so much as what to do when you get alongside and the state of the sea. You have only got to stick her up a little bit on one engine or the other and she will go wherever you want. But immediately you take the way off the boat, if the wind is too fresh it will get hold of the Waveney's high bow and the boat will want to slew down wind. So if you are in a head-up-into-the-wind situation you must keep working the engines all the time. You can't just knock them off and let her lay because she will blow down wind; if you are in a confined space, like we were then, with moorings around us and a wreck, you could be in trouble, but more often than not the power you have with the fast afloat lifeboats gets you out of the mire.

"For this service to Ma Jolie II on December 30, 1978, a bar to his bronze medal was awarded to Coxswain/Mechanic Bowrv.

Portchmouth: In situations like that, do any of you ever consider using your own anchor? Bowry: It restricts your manoeuvrability, but there again it's horses for courses.

Johnson: There was no way of using an anchor to veer down on the day we went out to the dredger. The dredger was stern to wind and sea and, as Charlie says, you had to keep working the Waveney's engines to keep her in some sort of position to clear the wires or any other obstruction. With a Waveney you are much better off with power on her than laying to an anchor.

Coxswain/Mechanic Richard Hawkins, Great Yarmouth and Gorleston: A vessel went aground at Great Yarmouth a few weeks ago. She had her anchor cable at 30 degrees from her hawse pipe and we had an old wreck just 50 yards astern. I had about 200 yards in which to manoeuvre with an onshore force 9 easterly gale. With no water there at all.

If I had had to go in, with the heavy swell and onshore wind, I should have anchored then and veered down so that if the propellers had got damaged I could at least have come out clear of the swell on my anchor. As it happened, the crew were all safe and it was not consideredconsidered necessary for us to go in. I agree with Charlie and Ian, that it is best to keep the power on a Waveney.

Bowry: We often do use an anchor for veering in. It's different for us because we are working in shallow water all the time. If I have got 30 feet underneath the boat I've got a lot of water there.

But it all depends. You get a situation where you cannot anchor and veer in.

Sometimes I have travelled a mile and a half with nothing underneath me. You are talking about the Middle Sands with the tide draining off in the Thames Estuary. Maybe the wind is north easterly and a yacht is blowing across the top of Middle Sands at about 31/: or 4 hours ebb and nine times out of ten they have an anchor but forget to stick it down. They just blow for miles and miles and miles across the top and you have to run after them. There is no way you are going to anchor in that situation.

Then it can happen with us that there will be a casualty with people on board on a bank in the middle of the estuary.

And perhaps she has come afloat but she is still bouncing. It's time for us to get alongside and get them off. It's no good hanging off until everything is just right. With a rise and fall of, say, 12 to 15 feet I reckon we are going to come off the top and strike the ground before long. There's no question of anchoring and veering in that sort of situation in the estuary; it is speed that counts. So you get everybody as ready as they can possibly be and in you go—and, touch wood, we've been fortunate thus far.

Now, if you were to knock the rudders and props out of the lifeboat going in and you couldn't use the engines any more, the boat would become a recepticle; you would blow clear off the other side of the bank, get your hook down and somebody else would have to come and get you. But you would have the people safe. It hasn't happened yet.

You get into these little situations and you think, 'I'm going to take the bottom out of her this time!' You know? And off you go and luckily you get away with it.

We are not talking about a mainland situation where you anchor and veer in to the mainland. You can be 27 miles down the estuary and 15 miles off each side, or something like that, and you still have got no water.

Coxswain/Mechanic Malcolm MacDonald, Stornoway: A lot of our coastline is too deep. You cannot anchor. A few weeks ago we launched to go to the help of a small tanker on passage from Belfast which had broken down about 12 miles south of Stornoway. She was in a hundred fathoms of water and she was only three-quarters of a mile off the shore. There was no way she could anchor. She was being driven ashore in north-easterly winds and she had 50 to 70 fathoms right up to the cliff. So we took her in tow to Stornowav.Portchmouth: What about tides? Do you have the state of the tides in your minds all the times? Bowry: Normally I read the tide table for high and low water every day, just so that it is in my head if we do get a call. Then I know exactly what the tide situation is at that time. You see, at a very early stage, it doesn't matter what their experience, my lads always know what you mean by chart datum and rise of tide above chart datum because we haven't got any water. We are always looking for some. We have got little graphs which show us straight away where we can go. We look at the graph and say, 'Right, that's 3'/2 hours flood; should be 2.5 metres on the tide now.' So straight away ve can look at the position of the casualty on the chart. 'That dries out 1.5 metres above chart datum, so there should be a metre over the bank.

We might just about have enough water to crack him off.

MacDonald: In my area we don't bother with tides at all. The tides don't affect us in any way. We've so much water we pay very little attention, unless we are going on passage.

Portchmouth: Can we hear something about your service to St Margarite, Richard? Hawkins: The wind was north east force 6. It was December 22. We had returned from the trip with Christmas fare to Smiths Knoll and Newarp lightships and we were just cleaning up when a call came through that a trawler was heading for the banks and she was firing red flares. The first indication was that she was outside the banks, so I asked the crew to put on their safety hats and lifelines. When we got about half a mile off the pierheads I asked the trawler to identify herself by putting up another red flare. And she was on the banks.

We thought she was on the east side of Scroby, which meant going four miies out to sea down Hewett Channel and then another two miles north west to get to her. Then St Margarite said she was breaking up, so I went straight across the banks, heading for South West Scroby Buoy because that was roughly the line of a channel. Then, when the casualty was still three miles away, a radar bearing showed that she was south of the channel. Making for her, I looked astern and it was just plain sand coming through the wash of the lifeboat.

I made the first approach but the boat was rolling and her trawl gallows were over the side, so I had to turn the Waveney on the sand and approach from a different angle. There were two men on board. The first one jumped all right but the other one jumped at the wrong time, just as a wave picked my stern up and pushed the boats together.

And the man was between the two boats. Four of the crew heid on to him while I brought the stern round and kept her clear so that they could pull him aboard. He was hanging on to a bollard. That's all the grip he had until the crew got hold of him. It took about two minutes to pull him on board.

Portchmouth: Did you put your boat on the sand? Hawkins: That was the first time.

Portchmouth: I mean right into it so that you had to back off again? I remember hearing it said that it used to happen fairly regularly up in your area.

Hawkins: It does happen, but not regularly.

Of course you do touch bottom quite frequently.

Portchmouth: And it doesn't worry you in a Waveney? Hawkins: No.

Portchmouth: What about you, Charlie? Bowry: Yes, we put our boat on the sand regularly. You see, a Waveney will give as hard a kick astern as she will ahead, so that if you really throttle her up when you are coming astern, her stern will just whip up in the air and if you have had to dust on a bit hard you can hump her off. We went for a little Colchester fishing smack which had rode right up on top of West Barrow one night. I was about two or three cables astern of her and just starting to take the revs off so that I would dust on nice and gently when a barge standing by shouts, 'Hurry up, he's going!' Well of course I had to cram the revs back on again then because she was settling.

There was no sea at all. We fetched up about 60 feet from her and lay there.

The Waveney gets a bit sort of tightrope- ish because she tends to roll each side of the little keel she's got. Anyway, you get the fishermen on board the lifeboat and then you want to get the Waveney off. So you hump her up on the engines. Really give her the stick.

Up comes her stern and she starts to shove back. Well, of course, you don't want to keep everything running because you don't know what's on the bottom; there may be big boulders. So you hump her off, let her knock back a bit.

You know what I mean? You haven't heard a clunk yet. So you give her another burst and gradually off she comes. The Waveney is a very good boat for taking the ground. I'm not saying I would like to sit there dropping from 15 feet on the top of a bank, but there is no reason why a Waveney cannot take the ground.

Portchmouth: What would you have done on that service if there had been a good sea running? Bowry. What, with the 'hurry up' situation that we had? The same thing.

Waveneys can take quite a knock. It is surprising what they will stand up to.

There were two elderly fellows whose yacht had broken down and blown ashore on the top of Grain Spit, just off the lifeboat station. They had got in the surf and one of these elderly fellows had gone over the side while trying to anchor. He was really in the mire and the other man wasn't strong enough to get him back over the side. Now I went across there with my boat. There was no time for anything fancy. You think, 'I've just got enough water', and you start sticking her in there and you have watched the sounder come up to nothing with still 200 to 300 yards to go and you get a lad down aft and you say, 'Let me know if you hear any clunks'.

He goes down in the after cabin and of course he can hear the shingle and the stones and everything chucking up around her. It's a bit frightening for the lad that's standing down there. And you are driving her. We had no time to mess about. Up alongside. Hook the bloke out of the water, hook the other fellow on board. The tide is draining down still, you see. I have my boat out of the water for a bottom scrape every six months and there has never been anything wrong with my props. With a conventional lifeboat, working sandy areas like ours, you would have a job to get yourself off. You would be washing her through, whereas with a Waveney you have got so much more power that you can go on and think, 'Right, I want to come off now'. And you come off.

Portchmouth: What about you Ian, with your Waveney? Johnson: We only anchored and veered down once last year. Two wild fowlers had gone out on to some rocks south of the station and got cut off by the tide.

We had to anchor in 15 feet and veer down, using the inflatable dinghy we carry as a breeches buoy. On another occasion a cabin cruiser ran aground on the Lady Isle, just off Troon, doing 15 knots. She drove her rudder and propellers up through her bottom when she hit the first scarf of rock and landed on the second scarf. The boat was filling.

Luckily we had a little 46ft 9in Watson as relief boat and I could afford to take the ground with her and bump her on to the rocks. So I took her up, skirting the first scarf, and took her on to the second scarf, bow on, and got the four people off. If we had had our Waveney, we should have had to anchor and veer down. So it breaks both ways. If it is sand, fair enough, you can take a Waveney on. but not if it is rock.

Bowry: When we had our 46ft Watson Gertrude, back in 1973, we had gone out to a yacht which had broken her rudder on the Middle Sands. Her skipper had rigged a jury rudder and was making his way home; he said he didn't need help. Then we saw red flares go upunderneath Eastchurch Cliffs. A 46ft cabin cruiser was in the surf and the wind was north easterly. Once again there was no time for anything fancy. So I got Gertrude's stern up to wind, right up into the sea and I charged her in. Hit the dirt; she travels a little bit; then she comes up all standing because her after end's aground although her bow is still afloat. Now that's handy because, although her bows may be wishywashing around, you never get a swinground, broach-to situation with the stern aground as the bow being still afloat always blows down wind. The tide was coming in and the sea started to wash in our open-backed wheelhouse.

Now as the sea was coming up it was riding us up as well, so I drove Gertrude and drove her and drove her and we clewed up 200 feet from the cruiser. All stopped. Washed right through. All you could see was the top of the wheelhouse and the mast. The rest was under the 'oggin' because I had driven all the rise out of her. A helicopter, he's arrived now and he's doing his sort of fluttering bit up there; he told the Coastguard he thought I had sunk, because he couldn't see a lot of me, do you know what I mean? We put a couple of gun lines in but the fellow on the cruiser couldn't get them. Now, I am drawing 4ft 9in and I'm in 4ft 9in of water and the breakers are rolling through. So we are wading round the deck and I'm beginning to run out of ideas. Now, I come across this big lad of mine, Malcolm. I says to him, 'How tall are you, Malcolm?' He says, 'I'm 6ft 3in, aren't I?' 'Well', I said, 'There's only 4ft 9in of water here, Cock.

Off you go!' Portchmouth: You've still got a crew, haven't you? Bowry: Yes! Well, Malcolm blows up his lifejacket and 'veers' in to the cruiser.

Climbs aboard. 'Morning, Harry', he says, because we knew the bloke quite well. 'Have you off here in a minute, Mate'. Turns up a tow line. I just back off, dragging Harry off with us, and we went home, picking up the other yacht on the way because by then her rudder had fallen off as well. And that's another little situation dealt with.* Johnson: Going back to the cruiser on Lady Isle. The only way we could get in was to put our bow ashore, so, coming off, I had to manoeuvre the Watson to stop her broaching on a wave. We didn't have too much power, her propellers being in tunnels, and the engines were mechanic controlled, but she came off fine.

Portchmouth: I believe some of you "For this service Crew Member Malcolm Keen, who, with his lifejacket inflated and with a line around his waist, waded through the breaking seas for about 200 yards to reach Gentlemaid, was awarded the thanks of the Institution inscribed on vellum.

carry inflatable dinghies on board. How do you use them? Have you had experience of veering them down? Bowry: Yes. We went out to a yacht on top of the West Barrow Bank: two kids, two fellows and a woman. Aground.

Sea breaking over the boat. Midnight.

I'm anchored. I'm veered in. I can't get any closer. You aren't going to start dragging two little kids through the water at midnight in a breeches buoy! In fact we were able to get a line across and drag the whole boat off, lock, stock and barrel, because we had the power, but if we had had to take the people off I should have used the inflatable. I have put a continuous grommet round the ratlings of our inflatable and I have moused two thimbles in at each end. So if I want to use the gun line I can send two veering lines, the block and the inflatable, and that way I get two off at a time. And a rubber duck pulls through the water quicker and more easily than a breeches buoy, but obviously you would not use this method in seas of great height.

Portchmouth: Do you use the inflatable in exactly the same way as you would a breeches buoy? Bowry: Yes, giving due regard to the sea height at the time.

Hawkins: We do the same as Charlie.

The way we use the inflatable couldn't be closer to the breeches buoy. Sometimes we row her, when there isn't any sea; it is another way of getting in to a casualty. On one occasion we had to search Scroby for two boys. It was dead flat calm and we put the dinghy over.

The crew rowed ashore, left the dinghy while they searched Scroby and came off again.

Portchmouth: Would you line on your dinghy? Hawkins: It depends on the weather. If there is a little bit of sea running, then a line. yes.

Bowry: If there is no other way of getting lines across to a casualty, you have to chance your arm with a couple of lads in the dinghy. But they want paddles, not oars. And off they go. Of course, it is very difficult because the 9ft Y class inflatable is the smallest kind of boat you can possibly use. And, once the rope gets in the water, whether it will float or whether it sinks, it becomes very heavy and the lads get very tired trying to pull the weight of the rope. So I put about 30 fathoms of line in the dinghy. The lads get perhaps two-thirds of the way across to the casualty dragging the line from the lifeboat, and then just as they are about to wang themselves right out altogether they pay out their bit. And there you are, all connected up.

MacDonald: An inflatable dinghv does usually put a exactly the same work as a breeches buoy but you can do more with an inflatable than you can with the buoy.

Last year we had to borrow an inflatable to pick up three men off a cliff face.

Portchmouth: Do you think it would be a good idea if the Institution were to supply nylon line, very light weight but very strong, for veering down an inflatable dinghy? Something very light so that the dinghy crew don't feel a great strain when the tide gets hold of it? Bowry: You don't want too small a diameter rope or it will cut a man's hand once you have got a bit of weight on it.

The important thing is that it should float and be about 2 to 2'/2 inches diameter.

You can then use it if necessary as a tow rope. If you are working athwart the tide and you get a distance between the lifeboat and the rubber boat trying to take the lines in to the casualty, you will get a big bow in the lines. If the lines become waterlogged and sink, there is all the weight of the ropes and they are dragging on the bottom.

You have only got to have a boulder of, say, a foot in diameter and with two blokes trying to pull the rubber duck in you have got big problems. And another thing: we have got our veering lines coiled down inside two black plastic dustbins, stowed in the after cabin.

We have got two rope tails on one handle of each bin so that we can fetch the bins out and make them fast on the well deck; the two ends are out all ready to use, and there you are.

MacDonald: We stow our veering lines in special, made up boxes, two foot square. They just come through the fore hatch and they are quite easy to handle.

Portchmouth: You have both got the same principle: a portable bin. Can we hear about your service to MFV Junella, Calum? MacDonald: We got the shout about midnight and we were under way in 12 minutes. The wind was about southerly, force 8, and a good punch all the way down. It took us about three hours to reach the casualty. The first intimation we had was that Junella was ashore on the Comet Rock, which we knew quite well—a very dirty bit of ground with shoal water. But when we arrived on the scene we found that she was on a rock about one cable north of the Comet. When we reached the area Junella was completely blacked out.

Her sister ship, Northella, was standing by in deep water about three-quarters of a mile away. Her skipper had Junella pinpointed and when he saw us arriving he illuminated the scene with a searchlight, so we just ran straight in on her.

We got in contact with the skipper of Junella on VHP and he told us that there was about 30 feet of water immediately below his stern. We got up alongside and Junella was lying half out on therock. Normally this rock is just awash at high water; it is like a tabletop with three feet of water on the top of it. My first intention was to run in and put my port shoulder on her starboard quarter but as we approached from astern the tide pushed us away and slewed my stern round to starboard. I had only, maybe, 70 foot between her stern and the rock; the rock face was sheer, too. I landed up stem on to her starboard quarter and broadside on to the rock.

With the tide setting towards the rock I was frightened that I would land up on the rock myself and with a Solent if you land broadside on to anything you are going to have great difficulty getting off it. As I made stem on in towards Junella's quarter my boat started turning, so then I used the engines full power and she just swivelled and I was able to pull out. The second run in I did exactly the same thing but I let her go, I let her swing, and she came right round and lay in alongside beautifully. Now, Junella had a trawl board hanging over her starboard quarter. Originally her pilot ladder was well forward, just below the bridge, with three liferafts in the water below the ladder. We asked her skipper to shift his ladder aft to the quarter, forward of the gallows, but the trawler's counter was rounded, so it still only left me about 20 feet of the ship's side on which to work. With a Solent I could only use her shoulder, from the stem to the break. She lay in there beautifully; she was no problem. There was a lift of about 12 feet and we took the crew down one man at a time. I was shorthanded that night and only had five crew. There were three men forward to get the fishermen off the ladder and one man guiding them into the cabin. We had a fair number on board when all of Junella's crew of 29 had been taken off.

It was pretty chock-a-block and we didn't have much room to move. A helicopter had arrived on the scene after we had been there about 10 minutes and he used his searchlights to give us some more light. We couldn't use our own searchlights at all.

Portchmouth: Why was that? MacDonald: Well, the fixing positions for the searchlight on a Solent are immediately in front of the wheelhouse windows, one to port and one to starboard.

If I had it on the port side, the light was shining across the windscreen and I couldn't see a thing. Put in on the starboard side and the searchlight itself was blocking my view. So we just scrapped the searchlight and worked on the deck light alone. An Aldis lamp would have been of little help and one man, holding it, would have been wasted.

Next refit we are getting a searchlight up on top of the wheelhouse.

Bowry: Helicopters have those great big parachute flares that seem to float in the sky for half the night, don't they? Beautiful. If they can chuck one of those out they've helped no end.

Hawkins: I should like two searchlights on the wheelhouse because Gorleston entrance is not lit at all and sometimes we have to put up parachute flares to enter harbour.

Portchmouth: Well. Charlie, what about your service to Mi Amiga? Bowry: Got under way, six o'clock in the evening. Force 9 north easterly.

Head into it. No water, really, from the start. We were sticking to the fairways because, in the Thames Estuary, even in the fairways you can be in something like 17 metres and it comes up to seven between fairways and then goes back to 17 or so in another fairway. And the motion of the sea across the shallow patches is bad news because it's fluffing it up there. There was so much clutter on the radar that I decided to go straight the way down past the Red Sand and Shivering Sand Towers and then cut up into Black Deep from what they call the Tizard Buoy. I managed to hold the revs on the lifeboat until the Red Sand Tower and then she was coming out and burying herself up to the wheelhouse windows and there was a lot of vibration in the boat. I fetched her back to 2,000 revs and that wasn't too bad. We couldn't see anything at all. Nothing out of the wheelhouse windows. Nothing on the radar. So I stuck two lookouts, one each side, just inside the safety lines and I got them to identify the characteristics of the buoys that they could see and give them to me in degrees off the bow.

And I found my position that way. The Port of London Authority radar station at Warden Point was helping us, too, as and when they could. We got down to the Tizard, shot across the top of the bank into Black Deep and there was Mi Amiga in all her glory aground on top of the old Long Sand. We estimated that she would come afloat at about 11 o'clock. Here was another "no anchor' situation. There was enough water to anchor but it was all wild and woolly and rather than risk the crew up on the fo'c'sle while we were standing by waiting for her to refloat I thought it was better to dodge up and down. Then Mi Amigo gave a shout that she had come afloat. Well, she was only a little ship. I don't suppose she was drawing much more than about 8 feet of water at most because we had a rise and fall of-12 to 15 feet on the echo sounder. I run up on the neon sounder and then, because I like to see the shape of the bottom coming up and know exactly when I am going to dust the boat on, I switch over to the paper sounder and I watch the bottom coming up to meet me and I can also see how far I have got to travel back, on the paper, to get myself in some sort of water and get afloat again.

I thought we were going to strike the bottom hard. You see, the man on Mi Amigo told me on the VHP that he's making water and he can't get his pumps started. It was no time to wishywashy about. The name of the game was to get alongside. I wanted to hold her up into the sea for as long as I could and crab in so that if we did strike heavily I could just stick her off the bank for a minute and see what sort of damage we had done before we had another little crack. You have got hold of the wheel, you know, and after a while, as she's coming off the top of a sea and starting to jump down you can feel your old hands tightening up, waiting for the crunch. When it doesn't happen you think. 'Well, that can't be bad. We got away with that'. And you are off again.

And you are waiting all the time for her to hit hard. You find you are all tensed up, your whole body, waiting for her to hit on hard. Anyway, we clewed up on his port quarter and laid off there and I thought, 'Well, if I'm on his port quarter I know 1 can go on his starboard quarter, so we are home and dry'. And we were still afloat. Mi Amigo had an emergency anchor out but she had no lee at all. The seas were peaking up, just like a load of bell tents all round the boat where she was working on the top of the bank. They had three big tyres on the starboard side as fendering. We did a little bit of parleying about whether he should bring off his belongings.

Portchmouth: Did you give him any advice on that, Charlie? Bowry: Yes. Then I said. 7 will now show you why we shouldn't take vour gear off. I needed to slip from his port to his starboard quarter where the fenders were and they watched from the wheelhouse window. One minute we were down below looking at his rudder, his prop and about 15 feet along his skeg; the next minute my lads, who are now up on the bow, are looking down at him. So he said, 7 see what you mean'.

Then he said to me, 'Can I bring a bird on board?' I said, 'Have you got a woman on there?' He said. Wo, it's a canary'. I was speechless.

Portchmouth: I don't believe it, Charlie! Bowry: So now we have got the men to take off, and the lads have got to have two hands to catch them. I stationed four of the crew inside the Waveney's guardrail forward and lashed to them.

One lad was on the radar to tell me if the ship was dragging, for we were very near a beacon. We had got all sorts of problems. Mi Amigo had got this 100 foot mast and every now and again she was dipping and striking bottom herself and that started to get a tremble on, and I thought, 'It just wants that lot to come down with all the stays and everything and we would be like a budgie in a cage ourselves'. Three of the men had come out to the gunwale—and of course she was rolling her gunwales in. There were stanchions on top of the gunwale itself, continued on page 23.