As usual, click for a larger view.
So, I'd mentioned in the last post that we'd done some navigation work while we waited out the storm, and that one of the things we had to do was learn at least the basics of European-style aids to navigation rather quickly. I had some fun one night doing up some notes and doodles of the mnemonic, "The Girls", and here those are! Capt. Kat had had something about sunsets, but somehow that didn't end up working for the rest of us, and we needed to be able to remember which cardinal mark had to be passed on which side (they all marked shoals or rocks or the like so getting mixed up could have really messed up our trip). I can't remember who exactly came up with The Girls, and it was dreadfully silly, yes, but y'know, it worked! We'd see that yellow band & say "There's our East Coast girl with her midriff showing", or a black band & say "West Coast Girl with her black bikini top" and with those reminders we managed to not run aground once during the whole trip.
It did also make us sing that Pet Shop Boys song more than was entirely necessary but it worked. Where things got really silly was when these 2 guys who LOOKED like the Pet Shop Boys wanted to raft alongside in Suomenlinna. That was bizarre (that they looked like the Pet Shop Boys, not that they wanted to raft up, they got in late on Midsummer's Eve & the place was full, we told them they'd be welcome to but we needed to get underway at 6 am and they ended up making off to the bulkhead instead, as did a number of late arrivals).
It was mostly east and west I needed to keep straight, but eventually we did add the Northern Girl in a big black hat and the Southern Girl in her Daisy Dukes. One of these days I'll finish the set!
3 comments:
Nice pics :)
Like it: "West End Girls" .... that's the way we do things in IALA Region A.
Looking forward to the Helsinki pics (interesting reference to Suomenlinna).
So if I see an NYC girl on the water I'm supposed to pass to the east?
That's correct!
I actually took a picture of the page showing these in the anchorage book we had, they're in Finnish & Estonian I think but the diagram's perfectly clear. I posted that in the last trip-report post.
They also use a lot of cairns - the first time we saw the sign for a cairn on the chart it took some digging in the back pages to figure out what it was.
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