David Copithorne

If it ever goes pear-shaped on the water here’s a sample Mayday procedure using channel 16:

•  MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY this is NAMEOFBOAT NAMEOFBOAT NAMEOFBOAT
• MAYDAY NAMEOFBOAT (followed by callsign if known an example Irish one would be ECHO INDIA ALPHA ALPHA ONE)
• Position is 1 mile south of Long Island Schull (alternatively give the latitude and longitude from the GPS e.g. 51 decimal 123 North 9 decimal 123 West)
• Diver suffering from decompression sickness. Immediate assistance required.
• 4 persons in total. 2 divers still underwater.
• NAMEOFBOAT is a 6 metre RIB with white hull and grey tubes.

If your VHF has a DSC button (usually red with a cover over it) you can use that first before making the voice call. Assuming it has been setup correct it will transmit a distress signal along with your GPS coordinates.

Some links:

US VHF Notes and Simulator

Irish Safey on the Water

Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

The original

Daft Hands

Daft Punk Girls

Drunk Daft Punk

This is a great café / wine / gourmet store serving some fantastic food. When I’m in Bantry I always end up getting something there, in particular the take away meals and chocolates. Highly recommended.

The Stuffed Olive, New Street, Bantry 027 55883

who, with two other main shareholders, managed to sell their company Auctomatic for €3.2 million. Well done guys!

Irish Times :  Limerick teens sell software firm in multimillion deal - John Collins

BBC: From Oxford to Silicon Valley, part six - Kulveer Taggar

Techcrunch:  Communicate Acquires Y Combinator Startup Auctomatic, Unveils New Business Strategy - Michael Arrington

Good service (though it was a quiet night) and the pan fried cod I had was first rate.

The Cornstore Winebar and Grill, 43 Cornmarket Street, Cork. Tel: +353 (0)21 425 1888

Located right next to the ferry for Valentia this pub serves some great seafood. It’s a very popular place to eat but they don’t take bookings so expect to wait and later to be moved on after you’ve finished your meal. I saw some reviews mentioning that the place wasn’t child friendly which may be true if you are a couple with a few kids as its a small busy place. We were a group of around ten with a 5 year old, a 3 year old and a 7 month old baby in the mix and didn’t have any problems, the staff had no issues boiling water for the babys bottle.

O’Neills, “The Point”, Renard Point, Cahirciveen, Co. Kerry. Tel:+353 (0)66 947 2165

Flickr

Congrats to Darragh O’Connor and the other members of University of Limerick Sailing Club for organising the 2008 Irish Team Racing Intervarsities in Killaloe. I was umpiring along side Conor O’Driscoll for the first two days of the three day event. The conditions as usual for Killaloe were very tricky, the wind was all over the place making the Race Officers job very difficult.

Great atmosphere at the event though the ’90s theme night did make me feel a bit old..

Link: Yachts and Yachting article about the event.

Erotic Falconry

I hope this is a spoof, not safe for work.

During a visit to Rossinis recently one of the group, a South African, asked why the Irish don’t eat more fish given that we’re an island nation? The explanation he got from most of the rest of us was that traditionally fresh meat was seen in the past as a luxury item leaving seafood as food for the poor.

Not long after I saw an interview on Bloomberg with a guy called William Doyle  CEO of Potash Corp. (the worlds largest maker of crop nutrients) who was hyping the low worldwide grain inventories which currently stand around 53 days of supply. Obviously Mr. Doyle has his own agenda to push but what was interesting were the reasons he cited for the increasing pressure on the grain supply. The biggest was that “there is a dietary shift occurring in China today” among the young of China who are moving from fish and chicken to pork and beef.

Tonight I was watching the last in the BBC series “Tropic of Capricorn” in which host Simon Reeve travels to all the countries the Tropic passes through. In Paraguay the host talks to a survivor of the 35 year dictatorship of Stroessner, a staunch anti-communist , who reigned over the death of over 50,000 people. The elderly survivor, a doctor, endured all sorts of torture and even lost his own son as a reprisal was asked what did he think of the current state of Paraguay? The thing that annoyed him the most was surprising: deforestation! According to the show 93% of Paraguays forests have been cut down so cash crops such as soybean can be grown. The soybean is mostly exported to become a component of animal feedstuffs for the European and Chinese markets.

Getting back to the Irish and fish it turns out that even though we generally don’t eat a lot of fish the majority of fish we do eat (58% in 2003) is imported.