Hugh Marriage Posts

The centenary of the 1916 Salcombe lifeboat disaster falls on 27 October and will be marked by a number of events in Salcombe town. A special moment will be at 1215hrs, when the current Salcombe lifeboat, Baltic Exchange III, accompanied by the inshore lifeboat, the Joan Bate, will lay a wreath at the Bar near where the disaster took place. It is expected that there will be at least four decommissioned lifeboats also present. Following the laying of the wreath,…

When I used to teach statistics, one way of engaging the brains of students was to offer £5 to anyone who could find a copy of the British Journal of Psychiatry without a statistical error. I never lost my fiver in those far-off days before computers. I used a similar trick when teaching criminology. The fiver could go to anyone who could think of any invention which had not given rise to a new crime. I never lost that fiver…

On 16 June climate change claimed the Millbrook Inn. We have had 14 months in a row of record temperatures. 2016 is on course to be the hottest year on record – the preceding one was 2015 and the hottest before that was 2014. Planet Earth has already passed the critical 1.5°C and is well on the way to the dangerous 2°C. The poor Millbrook was overwhelmed by a flash flood of water and silt pouring off (presumably ploughed) fields.…

I recently had reason to scan back over some of the 75 pieces I have written and smiled at some of the recurring themes. One subject I always seem to get wrong is the Egremont. My piece about her in May looks like no exception. That may mean that we have a problem, possibly even a big problem. Let me recap: Egremont was going for a refit last year and that was cancelled. Then she was going away this spring…

The Parish Council meeting about South Pool’s pontoon turned out to be better attended than expected so had to be moved to the Village Hall. We considered two issues. The first was indeed what to do about the pontoon, which was already overcrowded in April and the summer boats had yet to arrive. Should the pontoon be extended; or could it be managed better in some way? There were obvious attractions to extending it, although none of the possible ways…

I jumped the gun when I wrote that the Egremont was about to leave the Harbour. The trustees are apparently on the edge of securing new funding to tackle the interior of the Egremont as well as the outside, and delayed the refit. So what are the new plans? First, that sums of money not unadjacent to £1m seem to have been secured to refit the outside and, now, the inside of the ship. She will leave for Penzance either…

The start of new season is when we get the final news about the old season. Another year, another fall in the number of visiting yachts – we are now getting about 600 fewer than five years ago – but another, relatively small, but nevertheless useful, surplus to keep us going. It is becoming clear that July looks likely to be the busiest month (not August, as it was for so many years); that yachts are crewed by the middle-aged…

When we were last in Auckland, 30 years ago, it was a sleepy place and we struggled to find a restaurant open on New Year’s Eve. Today Auckland is a bustling yachting and cruise boat harbour, with extensive marinas (all by Walcon, like Salcombe’s) full of yachts and super-yachts. Two things struck me: the first was that the very largest yachts, both sailing and White Rhinos, were all registered in tax havens. It’s a funny world when the rich need…

European visitors first beheld the wonders of French Polynesia, which is where I am writing this, when HMS Dolphin, under the command of Samuel Wallis, entered the Tahiti lagoon in June 1767. Today our ship cruises at just 10 knots (only a tad faster than an 18th century frigate) and there is still plenty to marvel at – turquoise seas, white rollers on the reef, a rich variety of fish and corals, the silver sheen of black pearls, floating coconuts…