The setting:
I am a Baby Coastguard in Shetland. Have just taken my exams after a year of training.
I am number 3 in a 3-man watch. (Yes I know - womenpersons and stuff.)
It is a quiet Sunday.
We have done all the usual Sunday morning chores and are waiting for the next broadcast time we – well, I – put out the local weather and shipping forecast. Yes I read out the shipping forecast exactly like Radio 4. (But we don’t have a time limit like they do. We can read it out at a reasonable speed so somebody can actually take notes.) Anyway.
I get this funny feeling. An urgency. A je–ne–sais–quois but it's driving me bonkers. Something is about to happen. We are going to get An Incident. In the next hour or so. Before 1 o'clock. My Senior Watch Officer Bill asks me what it could be. I haven't the foggiest, but The Feeling is getting worse by the minute. I even go and get my sandwiches from the Galley ('tis true – Coastguards, ex-mariners nearly all, are prone to calling the kitchen by sentimental names) and eat them at my desk. Just so I will have food in my belly before the fun starts. And before I have to broadcast Mayday Relays in a hurry with my mouth full.
And time goes by. As it does, on a quiet Sunday.
I am baffled. I KNEW something was about to happen, and more to the point I knew where.
Where? asks Bill, humouring me. Here, I say, getting up from desk and going over to the chart table. I pull out a large chart of Shetland’s west coast waters, and draw an upright rectangle with a pencil cross at each corner, spanning quite a stretch. About 40 nautical miles top to bottom and about 20 across. Just to exorcise the details which are crowding my bewildered brain. And go back to my desk, quiet and thoughtful. But the chart stays out on the table for a while.
So for the rest of the watch I put up with the "And what Major Incident were we having? Can't hear anybody shouting yet.... Was that a red flare going past the window? No? Oh what a pity… – was that a Mayday I just heard? No! Oh well, maybe later" etc. They are getting so much mileage out of this and I have nothing to defend myself with, not even a lost crab pot. Not that anyone would bother us with a lost crabpot.
And then it's Sunday evening and our watch goes home.
On Monday it's my day off between the 2 consecutive dayshifts and the 2 consecutive nightshifts. If ever there was a job where you could meet yourself coming back half-asleep, it's this one.
So I sleep in, then go off to my amazing local rural supermarket + garden shop + off licence + garage. It is lunchtime. The wind is really strong today. I am being buffetted and thumped while trying to fill the car with petrol, when the shop owner wanders over to speak.
"That's some job you lot have got on just now."
"What job?"
"There's some drilling rig in trouble off the west side. Drifting out of control. It's on the radio."
I sort of have a mild heart flutter, and a moment where things go a bit sideways. Dammit. Was I right but on the wrong day?
When I get into work at eight that night, it is still going on – nay, is still getting going. After hours of struggle the Petrolia rig is destined to fill up half the night.
I look at the chart they've been using since lunchtime, when it kicked off. And there is the story so far, the track of this thing, from the top left down to the bottom right of my rectangle. This feels very peculiar, as if I'm looking at somebody else looking at the chart. Can't believe my eyes.
And it's getting closer to the cliffs all the time of course. The rig had been on its way round Shetland to a new drilling position before the weather gave it something else to think about.
It has two very powerful ocean-going tugs attached. Both tugs are straining to go full ahead. But the whole kit and caboodle is being blown backwards (at 1½ knots if you're into this).
There is still a full crew on board the rig. By this time such a camaraderie has been established with us that the crew are promising to take the entire Coastguard Service out for a pint if they ever get out of this mess. Then suddenly it’s the right time to get everybody off.
So we do all the business: get helicopters airborne, Coastguard auxiliary teams organised for reception of the crew ashore (names, numbers, next of kin, phone calls, toothbrushes required etc), and the crew are airlifted in batches. Our Coastguard helicopter takes the first lot to the nearby clifftops, site of car park, panoramic viewpoint and major lighthouse. The wind is so bad they can't get anyone off the aircraft without them being blown instantly to Norway so it flies further inland about a mile. Still no good. Along the road to the next junction, about three miles inland. Which by the way is the furthest you can get from the sea anywhere in Shetland. They try again. This time everybody crawls out saying their prayers and into cars and jeeps and takes over a local hotel.
A second batch is instructed to give up on that idea completely (and besides we hear the hotel has run out of beds and blankets – and probably whisky – and their local shop has run out of toothbrushes) so this lot is taken to Sumburgh Hotel, at the south end of Shetland by the main airport. Well it's handy for this second helicopter which we'd borrowed from Lossiemouth, like you do. It can refuel and get home before we come up with any more ideas for it.
And after the fuss died down, and everybody who wasn’t vital to something had been taken off the rig, and it still hadn’t hit the cliffs, and the wind started to drop, and the two tugs managed to start pulling ahead, Bill decided he'd been a bit hasty. He proudly announced that 'C' Watch was now to be known as The Psychic Watch, and just let anybody dare to contradict us, since he had the pencil marks to prove it.
I still don’t know why this stuff happens to me, but happen it does. “Happen,” as they say over in Yorkshire.
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