A life on the ocean wave

Today was my contact day for the SNSM, or the French RNLI. The chairman of the local station had telephoned me two weeks back to invite me to come along to their training sessions, held on Saturday mornings, theoretically at eight o'clock. That way, I'd meet the cox, whose word would be law.

They came in dribs and drabs, after having had an apparently very pleasant evening out the night before, with one or two people having distinguished themselves in the consumption department. The general opinion of those who turned up this morning was pretty dismissive - they would not have liked to have responded to a 'shout' with colleagues in that condition. Too many lives at risk.

The morning's exercise consisted of taking a school party from the Collège Roustan out on a familiarisation trip. The kids were really nice, interested, polite, a good advertisement for France's future. The teachers accompanying them were prime examples of what is best about the system here, despite the dysfunction of much of the structures and programmes.

The lifeboatmen turned out to be born communicators, who drew the kids out of their shyness and got them asking questions. The highlight of the trip, apart from a couple of cases of pretty dramatic seasickness occasioned by visiting the sickbay below decks as the boat wallowed in the swell, was the launching of an inflatable liferaft, the kind that explode into life once they hit water. Watching such a large object inflate and turn into something you can trust your life with is really humbling.

The kids were put onto the liferaft and cast adrift (with adults, including yours truly, accompanying them), as the lifeboat roared around them making big waves with its wake. When onboard, the lifeboat had seemed tiny, but when down at sea level, crouched in the liferaft, it seemed enormous. The liferaft itself was past its use by date, so could no longer be shipped as a legal requirement by any boat. The owner of the raft had given it to the SNSM for demonstration purposes, as they can only be used once. Onboard the raft were all the supplies, including ship's biscuit (horrible), sterile water packs (not a lot) and a chart of the world. Sitting that close to the water, surrounded by waves, makes you realise what a potentially hostile element the sea really is.

After the morning's outing, the crew set to lunch with fervour, very generously including me in their number. The local pizza delivery was engaged to bring high calory, very high cholesterol eats, and the cupboard, which I thought contained essential lifesaving equipment, provided the necessary liquids for life-support, namely pastis and rosé. In fact, a great deal of water was drunk too, especially by the poor guys who had had to don survival suits and had dripped sweat all morning.

Lunch was only moderately leisurely, as there was a guard duty for a regatta. So we cast off again, and motored out into the bay. Hardly were we amongst the yachts, when the VHF went off, asking us to go to the Isle St Honorat, off Cannes, where a motorboat was in difficulty. So on my very first day, I was involved in a 'mission' (shout). As we gunned the engines for the island, we started readying the tackle for a tow, shackling hawsers and unwinding rope on a winch, not easy when the deck is leaning backwards with the thrust, and the boat is beginning to buck its way through the waves, sending spray higher than the mast.

But which boat was in trouble? The information we had was vague, and all we had to go on was that it was blue and white, the commonest combination amongst the hundreds of yachts 'parked' in the roads between St Honorat and Ste Marguerite. Finally we got to our call, only to discover that the real problem was that they had snarled their anchor in the high voltage cable which brings over power to the lighthouse and navigation equipment on the island. They were still busily trying to desnag the anchor, despite the fact that several hundred thousand volts were passing through a cable directly attached to them by a metal anchor chain. Not our business, though, as other 'competent' authorities deal with that kind of incident.

So back to Antibes, passing through the regatta we had abandoned, and on to the fuel depot, where huge quantities of diesel were pumped aboard, as one poor sod from the crew was sent below, to the engine room, to check the levels in 60 degree heat. A task which allowed him to perspire all the water, rosé and pastis consumed at lunch.

The last duty, in a long day, was to scrub the boat clean of all the salt, which by now, under the mediterranean sun, had dried to a kind of sticky, corrosive slime. So it was mops away, at the end.