The Maritime ArticlesIeuan Dolby (1,187)    Ieuan Dolby    The Mariners Articles The Language of the Sea is EnglishPosted Friday, December 07, 2007 (161 days 22 hours ago.) Viewed 70 times. The language of the sea is English and whilst Mr Kwong (Second Engineer on some illegal North Korean Nuclear Transport vessel) or Jaun Carlos Castro (Cook and part-time Havana Cigar exporter on the MV Fidel) might not agree with or know about this statement most other seafarers do! The International Maritime Organisation rolled out this law
ages ago, that English would be the language of the sea, after they themselves
suddenly realised that they could not understand each other! Many years ago
from It was common during the eighties and nineties to find ships fully manned with one nationality, Pilipino, Russian, Indian, Alien, etc – with no reason for those seafarers to speak any other language than that with which their mothers and fathers forced them to choose a career at sea all those years ago! The Captain may have had to know a smattering of essential sentences like “pleeese, where be I”, or “big ship, big ship, get out the way” but the engineer down in the engine room had no need for English – very useful ignorance when port state control started snooping around or the superintendent visited! For the most part the working language of many ships was whatever the predominant language was onboard, with the deck officers simply memorising some essential sentences in English that enabled the ship to get into and out of some foreign port! Today, many ships are manned from top to bottom with officers and crews of varying origin, varying ranks of Poles, Cape Verdes and Indonesians work side by side over failing engines; all ‘effin and blindin’ at each other better than any British seafarer ever could and up on the Bridge the Captain speaking the Queens English over the radio to some Welsh Harbour Master who nobody can understand outside of Wales! Today it is quite normal for ships to sail with a compliment
of twelve fine and able crew members! It is also possible for this very same
vessel to sail around with twelve compeletely different nationalities, all
speaking English daily, all communicating, socialising and swearing in that one
common language! A Hungarian, a South African and an Indian heading off ashore
to ‘look at the local woman’; an American, a Croat and a Twenty years ago a certain vessel ended up aground not five
minutes after exiting Somebody may like to point out that many ships floating around today are filled from top to bottom with some weird speaking Scotsmen that even a Scottish lowlander cannot understand (some say this is not English, more like a group of people clearing their throats in a loud and unapologetic fashion) and others have noted that some ships sail around with Singaporeans who have created their own English language which again nobody can understand and that comes without a dictionary, but this anomaly might have to be accepted without question. No law in this world, no dictionary, translator or reduction in salary is going to make a Scotsman or Singaporean talk in understandable English so whilst all other nations have made great effort to learn the language and to use it in favour of their own tongue, they will just have to accept the fact that half those whose mother tongue is English can’t be understood by anybody else! 
Permalink Comments (0) My Internet Trading AccountPosted Friday, December 07, 2007 (161 days 22 hours ago.) Viewed 22 times. I could get 5% interest in the Teeny Tots savings bank down the road eh? I get 0.25% more if I leave it there and don’t use it for the whole year! If I open an ISA with the government indexed something or other I might (or I might not) get a little bit more than whatever somebody said I would get if I did something completely different. Sorry, but I’m not going to be able to retire on anything less than 20%. And so I headed off to
the “other place”, the one place that might just give me 20% if I play
my cards right and with a good bit of luck for good measure! It might just give
me more if I am careful but should I take risks or inadvertently play the wrong
card I might just see the initial sum playing a permanent vanishing trick. Oh,
don’t take me wrong! Don’t for one minute assume that I am going to start
sniffing and snorting in Ladbrokes over a horse or two or become an Internet
Poker addict. I have also not fallen victim to some Spam email that landed in
my inbox that read “send us your bank details and we will transfer the money to
your account now”. The one that was sent
by my best mate General George Washington Balonga stuck in a prison in the For the record I have also decided (with some due consideration) not to attempt a bank robbery or to start pick-pocketing at the local railway station. I have simply opened up an Internet trading account so that I may buy and sell stocks and shares whenever I feel like it and whenever the opportunity arises. I was in an airport lounge the other day! As per usual I was either going to or returning from somewhere, the place not being important and this large American decided to loudly enforce his opinions to his wife, another couple near by and seemingly the whole lounge, the security officials and the check-in desk in the departure hall outside. He said “it is impossible to make money from trading shares”! Well, blow me down right now with a feather! He shouted loud and clear “I tell you right now and with total certainty that anybody who starts trading shares on the Internet will never, ever, ever make a goddarn cent”. I couldn’t hear what his wife or the other couple were saying in response but he continued volubly, “I am telling you, it is totally impossible to make money on buying and selling shares”. Thanks, I am hearing you loud a clear! Maybe this was a message from God! I am positive that trading shares on a regular basis is a gamble! I did after all lose nearly 2000 pounds (not a great amount by any means but it was all that I had) during the dot com bubble burst! I am also positive that a false move, a sudden dash for a fast buck will end in tears but then what have I got to lose? If I take just a little fraction of my savings, place it into a trading account and if I do some hard research, if I gain a feel for market trends and if I buy into a rising stock rather than a falling one I might just end up with a little bit more than the miserly and very insecure 5% that I would get elsewhere. I don’t want the Ferrari or gold plated bath taps! I don’t see myself opening up Offshore Bank Accounts and managing to not pay British tax simply because I can afford a lawyer to ‘sort things’ out! I simply want to get just a little bit more together for my retirement. I want to get just a little bit more now! So I opened up this trading account with ease! Fill in this application form, sign here, read this very, very small print here, balk at the seemingly high fixed cost of 14 Pounds for every ‘sell’ or ‘buy’ and hey, bobs your uncle! Once all these formalities are done it would be quite within any new traders rights to run around some airport shouting “sell, for god sake sell” or to scream down the mobile phone on the number 41 bus, “buy quickly these shares are taking off, yes, a million, buy a million now, no belay that, make that two million”. And so I opened a trading account and after learning the program that this particular system uses I was ready. Well, not quite! I had planned on doing lots of research, of going to the library and reading books on the subject and to possibly buying the daily newspaper to see what was happening in the business world but for some reason I made my first grave mistake! I was simply dragged into the excitement, the gamble and hysteria and before I knew it I was begging others for more money, I was hysterically checking and re-checking falling stocks and I was biting my nails so far down that my knuckles were bleeding! As soon as I learnt how the trading platform worked I went and bought shares left right and centre and spent all of the money that I had allotted myself. I then went and found some more money and spent that as well! As the Northern Rock Bank fell to pieces as a result of the credit crunch my brain told me that it would be an excellent time to buy some shares in the other banks and so now I am part owner of the Bradford and Bingley, the Alliance and Leicester and some other Mortgage biased banks and I have watched what I have bought sink lower to come to a standstill at rock bottom prices. Although I have not seemingly lost that much in overall value, my money now just sits there and I cannot get it out to work! There is definitely not much point having a trading account if one can’t trade and looking at the current climate I don’t think I will be shouting “sell” in the very near future. That five percent in the Teeny Tots Bank down the road seems very attractive now – so does a cash box under my mattress for that matter! What made my brain tell my finger to press the button to buy I will probably never know! But I am beginning to think that the loud American, the angel with his views, might have been right after all!
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