Can you hear me, over? Sometimes it’s easier for a mariner to call up the International Space Station than his wife at home

In February 2005 Alex Whitworth and Peter Crozier were half way across the Southern Ocean, mid-way between New Zealand and Cape Horn when they decided that they would like to talk to someone.
Alex and Peter, both over 60, were on passage from Australia to the UK hoping to achieve a lifetime’s ambition, to sail in the Fastnet Race. They were sailing their 33-foot cruiser Berrimilla and not only did they complete the Fastnet, coming 11th overall, but they then turned round and sailed back to Australia to sail the 2005 Sydney Hobart Race. Theirs must rank as one of the all-time great circumnavigations.

Mostly it was a waiting process,
inadvertently listening to half
conversations… of sailors at sea

Berrimilla was fitted with satellite communications but Alex reckoned that at this point they were “as far as it is possible to get from another human being on the planet”. So he decided to try to contact someone off the planet, the crew of the International Space Station, or ISS, circling the globe and passing a mere 300 km above their position. Their message was received by a somewhat bemused US astronaut Leroy Chiao, captain of the ISS and the three chatted for a while.
Wind the clock back just 25 years to June 1990 and I was also mid-ocean, sailing with my co-skipper Hugh Cartwright (both somewhat less than 60) in the two-handed transatlantic race, or TWOSTAR, from Plymouth to Newport, Rhode Island. We were equipped with a very early GPS but communications were limited to short range VHF and SSB (single sideband radio) for longer distances.
SSB was far from new but at the time it was the best, if not only, form of long-range communication for small boats. One of the characteristics of SSB, as with other types of radio, is that operators transmit and receive messages on different frequencies so that anyone listening and waiting for their turn would only ever hear half of any message.
The available transmitting power of SSB on a yacht is tiny compared with others using the system, such as passenger liners and, of course, the Royal Navy, so it was often not easy to be heard by the shore station, in our case Portishead Radio. Every hour, on the hour, there was a three-minute silent period to listen out for any distress calls and then everyone, and I mean everyone, was trying to get through.
Fortunately Portishead had been briefed that there would be a number of yachts crossing the Atlantic that month and so when and if they could hear our calls they would give us priority. But for the most of the time it was a waiting process, inadvertently listening in to the half conversations of sailors at sea. I don’t know why but lonely matelots seemed to spend more time answering questions about lawnmowers and washing machines than they did about their own welfare. Another problem with SSB, once through to the person you were calling, was to make them understand that they had to say ‘over’ at the end of their message and that chatting was very expensive.
One hundred and eighty five years earlier and Nelson had no such problems when he signalled ‘England Expects…’ before the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805.
Misunderstanding messages has always been a problem but my favourite story is about King George V’s HMY Britannia. She was undergoing a refit in Cowes and the bosun was at the masthead putting the finishing touches to the royal crest on the truck. However, to dot the eye, literally, he needed a small amount of red paint and signalled down to his assistant on deck, who misunderstood what the paint was for and fetched a gallon can of it from the stores. This he attached to the main halyard and started to haul it aloft. Half way up, as Hoffnung might have said, the fall of the halyard became heavier than the can, which accelerated up towards the hapless bosun, hit the masthead and exploded, covering him, Britannia’s decks and about half of Cowes High Street in red paint.