Oolite Bulletins

DaddyHoggy wrote:

And at least the difference between port and starboard are easy to remember in the sense that larboard and starboard may not have been...

A friend of mine was once gifted a small handmade rum cask. (From memory I'd say it would hold somewhere around 2-3-4 liters.) Since it would be insulting to give such an item in an empty state, the gifter had concocted a special blend of some of the finest Caribbean rums available to him - and he has access to the very finest - to fill the thing with.
Befitting such a fine object, it was installed in my friend's wooden schooner at first opportunity.
At second opportunity we of course had to take the rum cask schooner out for a test sail. It was a beautiful day, sailing was good, rum was splendid. But at one point we ran into an unforeseen problem. You see, the owner/captain was at his usual place at the helm when it became apparent that the fluid level in his glass was dangerously low. As one of the more junior crew members it fell to me to remedy the situation. Unfortunately, the cask had been mounted twarthships, with the tap on the port facing end of the keg. At the time were sailing on a port tack, with enough wind to make us heel well to starboard, making it impossible to coax even a single drop from the keg. When I returned to deck to report this sorry state of affairs, his response was as immediate as it was decisive: "Ready about!"
In those brief moments, those ancient terms of 'port tack' and 'starboard tack' were irrevocably replaced by 'dry tack' and 'rum tack'. And for the rest of the day, any outside observer would have been hard pressed to find much rhyme or reason to our course changes, since they were guided not so much by the demands of navigation as the demands for refreshments...

That's a priceless yarn, Cheese, made me laugh.

Marvellous Yarn - right up there with "Ripping"!

Loved that!

Cheers,

Drew.