Landfall

Yesterday evening at the lifeboat station, while I was looking through lifeboatman shirts for Charlie, a young chap, Adrien, turned up with Fred, one of my fellow deckhands. It turned out that he had been crewing on the fishing boat which had radioed for assistance when the sailing boat sank last year (see post of October 17th, 2010).

Good job they had responded, because the sailing boat crew had taken precipitously to their little inflatable and were heading, so they thought, for Nice. Without a compass, and with a freeboard of a couple of inches, and very little fuel. Adrien added dryly that their bearing actually indicated that their next landfall, if ever they had made it, would have been Libya or Tunisia.