Been off the air for a while, busy at work and all….anyway still here, and heres a tale from a recent Master-Pilot briefing.
You get to chat with quite a few Pilots on these coastal hops, and you generally ask the same shite, ” Cup of coffee, Mr. Pilot? sugar, milk? or would you prefer Tea, soft drink, water?”
Yes Mr. Pilot she acts like a right handed prop, even though shes left handed variable pitch, and the bow thruster is 900 horse power, we can start to single up, engines are ready….and off you go again.
Some Pilots give all the instructions known to man, others ask if you are happy to manouvre the ship by yourself, I normally operate the controls anyway, and the pilot says what he feels is right.
You get to be a sort of Pilot story exchange, you tell each new Pilot the stories the last one was telling you. The Liverpool pilot said this and the Cork Pilot said that, anyway the Pembroke Pilot was telling me about an American family that had moved to Wales for a few years with a big corporation. We were talking about languages and Welsh, Irish and Swedish, anyway this American family had two young children going to school in the locality and the Welsh language is compulsory as a subject, so the young Americans were coming home speaking Welsh and the parents hadn’t a clue what they were saying. So the parents have taken up learning Welsh too. I can count to 5 in Welsh and can say one or two phrases thanks to having S4C and BBC Wales broadcast across the Irish Sea for years, the language is spoken by about 750,000 people world wide so these people are going to have a great secret weapon and a great laugh when they move back to the States, nobody will understand a word!
Cymru am byth!
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