Time and tide waits for no man, they say and it's certainly true on a boat where precise timings are often very important
Do you happen to know the time? It's a common enough question, often shouted from the cockpit to whoever happens to be nearest the chart table, usually because nobody up top wants to push back their sleeves and risk getting their Rolex splashed. Or in my case, my Timex.
Time matters on boats, whether it's tide times, lock opening times, or even pub closing time, the passage of the minutes hangs over us. We count them down to the turning of the tide in our favour or, if not so lucky, the minutes until the rising tide will float us free of our embarrassing grounding. Seconds are perhaps less vital these days; back in the days when the only fix might have been on a distant lighthouse or buoy, whether it was flashing three times every 10 seconds, or 20, had to be determined without doubt – not easy in a lumpy sea when the crest of the waves blanked out the light for several seconds at a time. The cockpit chorus went something like this: 'one hundred, two hundred, three.... Oh damn! ...one hundred, two hundred.....' And so this manic counting, sounding like a primary school class learning its times tables, broke the sublime silence of a night time passage.
And then there were the pips, the precise Greenwich time signal which preceded the important radio news bulletins of the day. Except it's not precise anymore. The BBC have admitted that the pips have been fibbing. What! Did they forget to wind the atomic clock in the bowels of Broadcasting House? Does this mean that when the sixth of those penetrating pips start, is it not really one o'clock? Have the pips been infected by the dodgy practice of rail operators who describe a train which arrives five minutes late as being 'on time'? Oh dear, perhaps time really doesn't matter any more.
You can blame the internet and its computers for the dodgy pips. Once again, this remarkable invention which has changed the world in a few short years, is shaking the foundations of everything we believed was beyond human interference. So if the pips aren't on time, why should the trains be? Those companies must be laughing at their good fortune.
The output of radio studios used to be fed directly to transmitters along copper wires where the analogue signal travelled at, roughly, two thirds the speed of light – that's fast. Employing the internet, the signal has to jump so many electronic hurdles that, by comparison
