Lost in Translation

I suppose it was fitting that the maiden voyage of my new yacht - Serafina Pekkala (the queen of the witches from Phillip Pullmas ‘dark materials’) should have an all girl crew, though afterwards as I nursed my aches and pains I felt that at least one male, if not a wizard, would have been useful.
We were very international –Jutta and her daughter Lisa from Germany, Anna the Dane, and me English of Viking extraction ( I love pillage, not sure about rape).
As they hadn’t sailed before, ever, I was a little nervous, I don’t know the boat that well yet, but we were only going round the Marmaris bay to anchor behind the island and have a picnic and a swim.
Before we left I was very careful to explain what happened when we had to anchor and especially when we came back in and parked. Both Jutta and Anna have good English, but nauticalese – that’s a different matter!
“ OK Jutta the marina man will hand you the slime line, you hand him the stern line and pass Anna the slime line. Anna you take it forward outside everything hauling it in as you go, and then put it through the fairlead, haul in hard then secure it to the deck cleat. Jutta the marina man will hand you back the stern line, attach that to a the cleat, then do the same with the other one. “ easy peasy.
“Vot is a cleat please?”, from Jutta, a bemused “ Penny there are so many ropes!” from Anna. I should have drawn a diagram. Oh well, I’ll explain again later.
We had a lovely day, Anna found steering difficult, problem between left and right, they should never have changed the side of the road they drive on; but we anchored OK. I stopped Jutta flambéing lunch, (GRP plastic boats burn amazingly well), and we had a nice salad and a bottle of wine. Then a swim and a lounge feeling superior watching the day-trippers getting drunk on nearby gullets. Then off to sail as the wind picked up. Well almost. The anchor is hauled up round an electrically powered windlass. Only this one jammed after hauling up half the chain, I pressed the reset button but nothing. With half the chain up we were now drifting slowly towards a nearby gullet. Nothing for it but girl power, so the international ladies tug of war team set to work. The wine we had had didn’t help but we eventually got it all up (the chain, not the wine) before we hit the gullet, trippers looking on interestedly at the sight of three grunting, sweaty females.
The sail back was fun, the wind between the islands suddenly gusts, then changes direction, so explaining how to sail wasn’t easy, doing it wasn’t that easy either. We had to tack a few times .
“Ve are going to attack? attack vot ?”
. “Penny, why are we going the wrong way, Marmaris is over there ?”
Then I went through the parking procedure again :
“This -cleat, this - mooring rope, this -deck, this - stern, – Ok “
“Vot?”
She’s not from Barcelona, but Hamburg must be similar !
I reversed in beautifully; Jutta took the slime ( bow) line from the marina man, she gave it to Anna and gave him the stern line. Great. I breathed a sigh of relief, turned away, and then back to see Anna, lying on her back along the deck, doing a passable caretta turtle imitation, with the bow line wrapped around her leg. I leapt forward to take it from her. Anna determinedly hung on behind me, so I dragged her and the line forward.
Hauling it in was hard, as Anna was hauling it as well, but in the opposite direction to me. Fortunately the nice marina man came up, gently removed Anna from the line, gave me a nice smile and hauled it tight and secure. He didn’t actually pat me on the head, but his look suggested he wanted to.
Back at the stern, Jutta had the other end of the rope back now, and was happily holding it, as the boat drifted from the pontoon.
“Tie it round the cleat”,
“ pardon me?”,
“round the cleat, that thing on the deck”.
Jutta looked around for the deck,
I suppose when you are faced with new and slightly alarming things happening your brain reverts to your native tongue -
“ By your foot”,
Jutta looked around for her foot.
I suppose naming a boat after a witch was asking for trouble. The windlass worked perfectly later.

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS MAN
How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!
In form, in moving, how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world!
William Shakespeare. Hamlet
Oh dear, William, you really got it wrong. I know you wrote it 400 years ago, but really ! The Elizabethan England you lived in wasn’t exactly a paradise. Heads rolled pretty frequently, not to mention public disembowelments and the odd spate of burning at the stake.
Look at today, this ‘godlike….piece of work’ isn’t doing too well is he. Africa is starving, Europe has food mountains, China is building a new power station every 10 seconds and America is ruled by George Bush !! Finland is ok, but its dark most of the time.
Still we are all terribly concerned about global warming, and we are running lots of conferences to save the planet. Have I got news for you ! This planet started about 4.5 billion years ago, it’s warmed, cooled, warmed and cooled again a few times since, not to mention the occasional giant meteorite zapping into it . But it’s still around thanks… and will be for few more billion years.
We won’t.
We’ve been here about 100,000 years, ( bit less if you believe Irish bishop James Ussher who in 1650 worked out that the bible made it about 6000 years ago - on oct 26th, day before my birthday) – ‘how noble in reason ??.
The simple fact is that we aren’t damaging the planet, but we are damaging our ability to live on it. Or our great grandchildren’s. But lets face it given the mess we make of simple things like not over populating it, or just feeding everyone, perhaps we don’t deserve to last that long.
The dinosaurs did a better job, I bet they probably farted out more global warming gasses than we ever produce, but they didn’t have conferences about it. They might not have had the ability to reason but they lasted about 150 million years , and it was an unforeseen event, a large piece of rock, that did for them. Flatulence didn’t come into it.
Granted we have produced the music of Mozart, the prose of Shakespeare and the art of Michelangelo, which the dinosaurs probably didn’t manage, but we have also invented an infinite variety of ways and reasons for killing ourselves and other species, from the spear to the neutron bomb, and we are still doing it.
The good thing of course is that though we may mourn here in our beautiful environment in Dalyan delta, the destruction of the ditches , the levelling of hedge rows, the surging swell of hundreds of river boats, the effect we have, in global terms , won’t last that long. The arrogance that makes us think we are top of the evolutionary tree, and believe in an everlasting human soul, also overestimates the impact of what we do.What a piece of work is man ? Sorry Will - great prose, but we aren’t the beauty of the world . Not yet any way.