Birvidik

Modern sailors (and I definitely include ourselves in this) are a bunch of soft, southern big girls' blouses. Pampered by the comforts of technology we won't even contemplate going to sea if, for example, the bubble control on the Jacuzzi malfunctions.

When I first learnt to sail we blundered our way around the rock and current strewn Channel Islands with nothing more sophisticated than a lead weight on a length of marked string. The high tech versions had a depression in the bottom of the weight which was filled with tallow. When you pulled the lead-line up you could look at what was stuck in the tallow and tell the captain what sort of surface he was about to hit. As for position finding, big ships had decca and loran-C. If we were lucky we would point a compass at a couple of dubiously identified marks, randomly draw a triangle on the chart and confidently proclaim that we were somewhere in that triangle.

Probably.
Well, perhaps anyway.
If we were lucky.

Taking scale into account the said triangle could have accommodated most of the Channel Islands and adjacent coast of France. If we were unlucky, we had to rely on determining our Estimated Position. Doing this worked on the principle that a good 80% of the time we knew pretty well where we had started from. All we then needed to know was which direction we were travelling in, how fast we were travelling through the water, in what direction and at what speed the water was travelling, and how much the wind was blowing us off course.

All of these were riddled with potential error. We were lucky if we could hold a course more accurately than five degrees either way. Speed through the water was calculated by throwing a piece of wood or a recalcitrant crew member off the bow and timing how it took for him to disappear into the propeller. Tidal flow was interpolated from tidal diamonds on the chart. This, ironically, required you to know where you were so as to determine which tidal diamond to use, whereas the whole point of the exercise was to try and find out where you were in the first place. Finally, leeway was calculated by looking over the stern and guessing the angle between the boat's direction and its wake. Adding all these errors together you came up with what was dispiritingly known as a 'circle of uncertainty' which usually encompassed an area about the size of Belgium. You could then say with reasonable confidence that you might, just about, be somewhere in there.

As for weather forecasts - obtaining one entailed hunching over in a lurching saloon with your ear pressed against the speaker of your transistor radio as the comforting tones of 'Sailing by' announced the 00:33 BBC shipping forecast. These dealt with 31 sea areas the size of Wales and upwards in 3 minutes and 300 words. To cope with these restrictions, a coded shorthand was employed which was incomprehensible to those not trained in its arcane eccentricities: "Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes, South East Iceland. Southerly 7 becoming south Easterly Gale 8 soon. Rough. Rain and sleet. Fair, becoming poor to very poor. And now the reports from coastal stations at 18:00 G.M.T. today...Tiree. Southerly 6. Rain. Good. 998 millibars, falling slowly.....

The familiar format took on the air of a religious rite as nervous mariners awaited the pronouncements of the high priest of the BBC met office from the inner sanctum of Bush House. 'Going foreign' involved leaving this cosy sanctuary. Although radio 4 could be picked up on long wave, reception became progressively poorer and the forecasts progressively less relevant. The gallant English mariner then found himself in the discomforting position of being dependent on the dubious information emanating from Johnny Foreigner. Given the traditional English incompetence in foreign languages, it was really rather decent of our continental cousins to make a habit of giving forecasts in English as well as their own language (although we have met some ultra xenophobes who are convinced that the English versions are deliberately erroneous as revenge for Trafalgar and the Armada).

These days we get our weather forecasts over the internet via the mobile phone network. These are updated every three hours or so. Our position is shown by GPS. This still has a circle of uncertainty, but nowadays you'd have trouble fitting an office desk in it. This position is then relayed to a chart plotter which shows a cute little boat shape trundling its way across the chart.

And so it was that Birvidik, bristling with technology and creature comforts, sailed jauntily from Marmaris en route for Symi. We motored into Panormittis, a beautiful secluded and protected bay on the South of the island, and dropped the hook. Then it started. I switched off the autopilot. This action, for some inexplicable reason, offended the GPS in the chartplotter which bleeped twice in annoyance and promptly switched itself off in a sulk. Nothing could coax it back into service. Not to worry, we still had two backup GPSs. We're nothing if not cautious.

I decided to get a Met, so I fired up the computer and attached the dongle. Merely having this arrangement was a triumph in itself. After much bureaucratic wrangling we had finally managed to get an internet contract with Vodafone Greece in Corfu in 2008. This was a process so entangled in labyrinthine, Byzantine complexity that we kept paying the monthly subscriptions even whilst we were in Turkey, just so that we could have it immediately available whenever we returned to Greek waters. The program chuntered about for a bit and then protested that it couldn't find a network. This was surprising given that we were moored in the shadow of a bloody great comms mast and our ordinary Greek mobile phones had maximum signals. In addition our fluorescent lights thrummed and pulsed like something out of 'The Twilight Zone'. Even the cooker gave off a dull glow and emanated snatches of ghostly Greek conversations. What do you mean 'network not found'? There was so much electromagnetic radiation around that if you stood on the saloon table, equidistant from the toaster and the steering compass and spun round with your arms in the air the computer gave you a whole body scan.

As we were in the middle of nowhere we decided to head on to Nysiros the next day and see if we could sort things out there. We set off using the Garmin GPS to check our position and headed for Pali on Nysiros. Halfway across I noticed that the Magellan, the 'backup, backup' GPS had suffered sudden onset Alzheimer's and kept forgetting where the satellites were. We were now down to one GPS and panic started to set in.

Nysiros is a lovely island, with a protected harbour, picturesque villages, friendly locals and a stunning, and still active, volcanic crater. Its population, though, is a tad on the small side at around 2000 souls and so it's not exactly a hub of commercial activity. In fact, apart from tourist shops, tavernas and basic food shops, business is so slow that absolutely nobody keeps any stock at all. Whatever you want has to be ordered from Athens and can take weeks to arrive. This can pose problems if, to pluck an example entirely at random, you suddenly find yourself running low on colostomy bags. Unsurprisingly, therefore, we were spectacularly unsuccessful in our proposed tasks of getting the chartplotter fixed, buying a replacement backup backup GPS and getting the internet setup working again.

We were, though, given a contact number for Vodafone which I duly rang. After being shunted through a succession of operatives, and having been exposed to enough of 'My Way' being played on a Rolf Harris stylophone to be in obvious and blatant breach of the Geneva Convention, I was informed that the account had been unilaterally closed. Despite my pleas she was either unable or unwilling to elucidate why this had been done, instead stalling by asking for increasingly obscure pieces of data. I hung in there and managed to wring multidigit numbers for IMEI, IMSI, and ICCID from the computer when, in desperation, she stumped me by asking for my Greek tax number. "I haven't got one" I said, my voice about half an octave higher than usual. "You must have" said she with an air of self satisfied finality. "If you don't have a Greek tax number you're not allowed to have an internet contract". QED - game set and match to Greek bureaucracy.

Further investigation revealed that the only places in Greece that you stand a snowball's chance in Hell of getting anything done, ever, are Athens, Corfu, Kos and Rhodes. Rhodes would have taken us back where we started. Athens and Corfu were miles away and so, as soon as these gale force Northerlies blow themselves out, it's back to Kos to sort it all out.

So much for an early start.

Mind you, if we were proper hairy sailors I'd have sharpened my pencils and ploughed on regardless, relying on trad nav.

If.