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It was a Saturday morning in February. I was lazing around in old clothes, bored and wanting to do something nautical. 

" I have a great idea", I said to my wife, "Let's go the the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, I haven't been there for years!"

Having been at the museum for a while, I happened to look into a doorway and a chap dressed up as an Nelsonian seaman said to me "You sir! Are you as landsman or a seaman?"

About 150 children and adults were looking in my direction, waiting for my reply. Swallowing hard, I stupidly said "Seaman". The fellow dragged me into the centre of a very large room where a reenactment was taking place, staged by actors. They made me carry, and load, imaginary cannon balls and the like, to howls from the audience, particularly when I bent down, although I did not think my efforts were that funny.

It was only when I finally managed to escape that my wife happened to mention that there was a big hole in the seat of the old corduroys that I was wearing! I got out of the place as fast as I could!

This story tickled our curiosity, so we did a bit of snooping on the web and found a website you might like to visit to find out more about the Historical Maritime Society .

'Bluebeard the philosopher' can always be relied on to take the rise out of himself, too...

I took my boat over to Arnside from Morecambe, The tide is 25 minutes later at Arnside and comes in with the bore. The time slot is very crucial and, when I say crucial I mean 10 minutes crucial. You guessed it. I didn't make it. I ran aground on the top of a Neap Tide. I had to walk out over 3 miles of quicksands and running channels and leave the boat there for 7 days before she would float again. I could not use the excuse that I was just cleaning the hull, not for 7 days anyhow. 

Old Bluebeard still hasn't lived it down. I still get the mickey taken out of me, even to this day, by other club members! 

This one from Dave Bowdler gave us pause ...

I went skiff sailing in January of this year. The forecast was for winds to Force 7,  good visibility and the bonus of wind and tide together.
The boat we use for this is an 11-footer (about 3.2 m) which carries a 9-metre rig. 

Dry-suit to the fore, we started off and, with both of us on the wire, I quickly hoisted the 'small' 55sqm kite (the big one is 65sqm) onto the fixed gennaker pole and it filled up. 

The boat came up out of the water, on the plane , with the daggerboard just in the water. Then, disaster!  I hit a poor sea-lion, sending the pair of us flying and splitting the new carbon-fibre boat in two, right down the middle... We looked for the sea-lion but there was no sign of it... then it popped up and swam off... 

The moral of this story? Don't,  whatever you do, hit a sea-lion - the repair bill came to 10,000 GBP!

Bill MacFarlane, the soul of discretion, refrained from naming the friend in the following true story...

A member of my previous yacht club, probably the most accident-prone man I've ever met, bought a new 24' Beneteau. He named the boat 'Passing Wind' without seeing the implications of it. 

He was sailing through the Looe channel off  Selsea Bill one night when the overfalls were fairly lively. My friend's  crew lost his footing, going down below, and was knocked unconscious. The skipper didn't like the look of him, so he grabbed the VHF and sent the following emergency message: " MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY,! I'M PASSING WIND IN THE LOOE."

 He wondered why he never got a reply!

Bill then told us one against himself, showing that he's a good sport and has the great quality of being able to laugh at himself, too, not just at his acquaintances...

I'd been 'Scuttlebutting' (Ed: contributing to Yachting And Boating World's Scuttlebutt forum) for a fair few months and had agreed to meet a couple of 
people, whose faces I didn't know, at the Rival Bowman stand (Ed: at a boat show) to look over the Starlight 35. 

We met up and I thought one of the faces was familiar - too right it was - he only owned the boat tied up to the same pontoon as mine at Chichester! We had been communing quite happily over the Internet but hadn't bothered to say a neighbourly hello when sitting in our respective cockpits! 

Mike Harvey , as so often, makes a good point on the subject of the 'Whoops!'...

The cause of many a 'Whoops!' was the Victorian steam-driven Royal Navy insistence, for some reason best known to the admirals of the time, that steering instructions should be passed by ordering the direction of the (notional) tiller head. 

In other words a turn to starboard would be ordered as so many degrees of PORT rudder. Makes you wonder how we found an empire let alone made one!

You know it's funny Mike should say that. We noticed, in the movie 'Titanic', that the helm was turned in the opposite direction to the one ordered by the captain, without anyone on the bridge passing comment. We wondered whether it was poor continuity or a deliberate suggestion that the youngster at the helm didn't know right from left...now we wonder if he was supposed to be an ex Royal Navy chap who could be expected to re-interpret the skippers' orders... mind you, that would be daft, because that would have meant the skipper was telling him to head for the iceberg...oh, never mind, it was only a movie!

Have you a story for Whoops!? We'd love to hear it!