Secure the mainsail

Well that was a beefy one - a sizeable cutter and a raft of tea clippers, and behind them a little raft of some poor old sod from the old barge the HMS Bryan Boyle who was a castaway - outkast - cast onto the high seas and left to drift hundreds and thousands of miles off course at a paltry 5 knots if he was lucky - poor old bugger. Shades of the story of a chief petty officer from the HMS Brian Cuff. Those tea clippers though are long-haul ships but they have a tendency to be nosy, and as me old mate Capt Jack Sparrow says, pirate of the caribbean, such ships should mind their own business on their bowheads. Reminds me of the peelers and press-gangs of home, nosying about the brackish waters, back in Austria-Bulgari, where so many clippers pose not as South African cutters, but as Austro-Hapsburg barges full of the usual coal from Newcastle, yes Newcastle. The SS Schuster, the SS Stocker, the USS Lexington - always in an Austro-hungarian port, and the little tug trailing around after her, the SS Tardis and the sister ship the Portuguese-chinese junk carrick out of Hong Kong, the old SS Lusitania, followed everywhere now even as far as Macao by the american destroyer, the SS Ruscillo-rosetta. All these ships regularly report in to Vienna, via the Port-warden of St Polten and St Christophero V Schonheit - !!