Tims Times

Another crazy night on the VHF radio, the appaling standard of spoken English on the radio is so bad that it’s a wonder there aren’t more collisions and groundings in European waters.
There is a story going around about the “Sea Empress”that went aground a few years ago in Milford Haven that the Salvage Tug crew were Chinese and couldn’t speak English so they had to enlist the help of a cook from a Chinese Restaurant in the locality. Could be true, correct me if I’m wrong!
I heard a few classics on the radio, one of the signal stations asked a ship what the cargo was, the guy replied “gasoline” then they asked him what kind of ship he was, the radio went silent, he had to ask them to repeat the question as he like me could not believe the question, and sure enough they asked what kind of ship are you. He should have said “have a guess”, but he just replied “tanker, with gasoline cargo” .

The weather conditions at the moment are fine with high pressure, so the VHF signal travels further than normal and all the VHF stations from France, England and Ireland can be heard at long range, the normal messages are being broadcast on top of each other leading to all sorts of confusion, ships answering the wrong questions and wrong stations being called up. I heard Valentia in Ireland, Falmouth in England and Ushant in France all at the same time. That on top of the normal lack of English skills from people, who have difficulty saying “North” or “West” and the numbers are anyones guess.
I think that the ships should have English voice simulators, you speak into the machine in your own tongue and out the other side comes the best BBC English, then we wouldn’t have to listen to “Allo, allo”, from the French, funny and all as it is. Otherwise they should invest in importing a few English speakers for their VHF stations. Although the Falmouth operator sounded distinctly Norn Iron….oh well I better stop here before it gets totally confusing.