Overheard at a children's swimming lesson session

Mother 1: "How's your little Jimmy getting on with his swimming?"

Mother 2: "Oh, much better. He sinks much more slowly now."

!
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 12:44, Reply)

"We can twok enyfing!"
While on a boozey lads holiday we met two drunken chaps from Liverpool who constantly professed their uncanny ability to steal anything with wheels on.

While watching the sun come up over the sea the next morning, we again saw this pair of master criminals wandering down to the sea, eyeing up the boats, no doubt about to practice their cunning arts of automobile theft on something without wheels.

Ignoring the number of quite expensive boats currently moored on the beach, they got in a small rowing boat and proceeded to row it, while anchored, for two hours until a large gentleman appeared and shouted at them in Spanish, at which time they fell out of the boat and legged it.
(BadgerSmaker, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 11:26, Reply)

Not the smartest mates.
So they decided to take the ferry across the Lough for a day on the piss and enjoy it so much that they miss the last ferry back.

No problem you might think, just drop your standards and try and get a bed somewhere, or heck even be honest and tell the barman your story, I’m sure they weren’t the first or last to get stranded.

Not these brainboxes though, they decide to “borrow” a boat and make the 4 or 5 mile crossing themselves.

Except both were hammered and somehow managed to get stranded in the middle. So they do what they have to and get in touch with the coastguard, only to realise that they were on the coastguards boat, yip with all the boats about the place they decide to take the lifeboat.

Not surprisingly they were stuck for quite some time.

TL:DR, guys get drunk steal boat get stranded find out they stole the lifeboat
(Samantha Bricks Better half done a poo on, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 8:50, Reply)

Would it not be fair to say
that police having to warn surfers to get out of the water because the huge mega-fucking-storm Sandy was bearing down upon them was probably a wasted resource?

I class it in the same boat as people who sue the local (beach-based) council because they got "dumped" by a wave whilst body-boarding (body-surfing) and injured to the point of being para/quad-raplegics & thus sued the council for not posting warning signs that such an injury could occur. Trust me it's happened here in Western Australia, more than once.

Smoke 'em if you've got 'em people.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Thu 8 Nov 2012, 6:17, 4 replies)

I get seasick.
Very seasick. For someone who spends most of his spare time afloat, this could be a problem, but I keep it under control with Scopoderm patches and all is well. Unfortuately, supply of these little beauties is highly irregular (on prescription, unvailable, over-the counter, unavailable, on prescription ...) and in one of the unavailable phases I ran out in the middle of (a) a trip and (b) the Irish Sea.

So I went to see a nice sailing doctor in Peel (there is always a sailing doctor in any seaside town) and explained my problem. No problem, said he, and happily prescribed me something rather more powerful than the Stugeron / Kwells / over the counter stuff.

Being a good little chap, I read the patient information leaflet very carefully. And there I found, regarding the drug I had been given to prevent seasickness...

"Side effects. May cause nausea, dizziness and vomiting."
(ubergeekian, Thu 8 Nov 2012, 0:12, Reply)

Oh.
It turns out, the poop deck wasn't what I thought it was.
(The Incredible Sulk Finally remembered his password on, Wed 7 Nov 2012, 23:46, Reply)

Sickypoos
The first time I was seasick was when I was 8, on the Cook Strait ferry. As the youngest spawn of a naval family, I'd smugly assumed I was genetically immune to queasiness. For the first hour, the smug increased as the ferry progressed through a mildly choppy sea and the other kids onboard succumbed to nausea. "Pah, wimps" I thought as I ostentatiously helped myself to a huge strawberry ice cream ...
and then the ship hit a sudden trough. It was like the eeeek part of the world's worst rollercoaster and suddenly my stomach was sending me an unmistakeable "get to the crapper" signal and I flew into the nearest one to find other passengers power-spewing in every cubicle and urinal so all I could do was stand in the middle of the toilet floor and ERUPT. To this day I remember the graceful arc of bright pink chunder splattering and forming a perfect Scotch pancake.
Then a Sikh gentleman came round the corner and stepped in it.
(Mr Gronk, Wed 7 Nov 2012, 20:50, Reply)

[chthonic here posting on behalf of a poor b3tan cut off by the government]

The Ministry of Defence has taken exception to b3ta, and blocks access to the website (which ended my amateurish photoshop image challenge entries) - although the filters merrily let the newsletter through every week, even if 95% of the links are verboten. I did want to submit a tale to this QOTW though, as the salty liquid that runs through my veins is not Jimmy Saville juice, but instead is seawater. As I am a LONG way away right now, can you post on the forum on my behalf, pretty please?


You see, I am a serving seagoing officer in the Royal Navy (a job I fell into after university for temporary reasons of boredom relief, but which I have stuck out as it turns out I rather enjoy messing around in grey metal boats) and have spent most of the last 12 years at sea. During this time, I have served in the only ship named the same as rhyming slang for lady bits (HMS Berkeley, named after Berkeley Hunt, which - as I'm sure all b3tans know, is why calling someone a "berk" is actually rather ruder than they might think), I’ve been around the world (twice) “protecting British interests” (lots of which involved getting drunk with local VIPs, so they did the diplomatic equivalent of slurring “Britain - you’re my beshtest mate ever, you are ... hic”), I’ve seen there are a lot more nice Argentineans in the Falklands (4) than there are nice RAF officers (1), and I’ve been involved in some pretty hairy standoffs with ships from (unnamed but unfriendly) nations bordering hot sandy places, but which (almost) always ended without shots being fired. However, of the numerous examples of tales I could share with fellow b3tans, most do not pass the “Daily Mail” test*, so will have to wait until the Ginger Mayan cycle of QOTWs resets in 2021, by which time the Question will recur and I’ll be the bursar of a minor prep school in Wiltshire anyway...

So on this occasion, I’ll let you into one item of naval trivia, which involves the dull esoteric world of international radio callsigns. You see every ship in the world (warships, merchant ships, fishermen, etc) has a unique callsign, made up of 4 or 5 letters and numbers, which identifies it on the radio, or on the shore-based radar systems, in order to avoid confusion of the number of ships with similar names (ie there are a lot of yachts called “Saucy Sue” out there). Just like the registration of aircraft, all British ship callsigns begin with a “G”, and when the Navy finally agreed to register its ships in the 1980s, it started with GAAA, then GAAB, and so on. By the time the sequence reached the 25th ship on the list, HMS Ranger, the unstoppable majesty of naval administration carried on regardless. This means that, to this day, a sleek grey messenger of death drives around the oceans announcing itself as “British and GAAY” (and probably very proud). And where does this warship spend its time? Well, rather appropriately, although the official base port is Portsmouth, it is currently a training vessel attached to the Sussex University Royal Naval Unit, which means that – uniquely in the Navy – it is actually based in Brighton. It is, quite literally, the “Pride” of the Fleet... [cue Village People, “in the Navy”]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Ranger_(P293)

Yours

“Beelzebob-a-job”
( chthonic, Wed 7 Nov 2012, 17:54, 12 replies)