Although I had an aviation RT licence for the radio for my plane, I didn’t have one for my handheld VHF waterproof marine radio for sailing and kayaking and the aviation licence didn’t cover it so it was time to go on a course in a North Berwick church. I parked in North Berwick and a woman parked beside me and then started to go on about the parking problem in North Berwick – as far as the eye could see were empty places in a car park a short distance from the High Street so I wasn’t too sure what the problem was.

The VHF instructor had just returned from Antarctica and there were three others on the course – a diver who had been off St Abbs the previous day; a geologist from British Geological Survey, just back from Antarctica too, and who was going on a purporse built ship to map a white ribbon of unsurveyed land off the British coast; and a taxi driver from Kelso who had bought a boat suffering from osmosis and wanted to learn to sail so he could winter it in the med.

The radios were all wired together and we bartered cockscrews for Golf November Tango (G’n'T) and we learned nuggets of information such as that all calls are made first on the distress channel 16 – what! – then changed to another channel to free up the distress channel. Fortunately with digital radios it is possible to make a call to a ship without going through the distress channel first. In addition Maydays come down to pressing a button and all your details including position from onboard GPS are sent out digitally – provided you haven’t sunk more than 35 nautical miles from the nearest station. The EPIRB rescue beacon used to operate on the aviation distress frequency of 121 decimal 5 MegaHertz – and that used to narrow down your location to 500 square miles of ocean! Now GPS gives it in metres… thankfully.

Lunch was in the North Berwick Fry fish and chip restaurant which had a flast screen telly with subtitles talking about breast enlargement as 40 Indian women were chatting about finding a husband.

We all sat our test in different rooms each with stained glass looking down upon us and over coffee we were all told we had passed and went through the questions we got way wrong!

I had dinner arranged later so had some time to kill so went for ice cream in Gullane and picked up some lovely cake from the German bakery there, drove along the coast to Edinburgh then down to meet Gordon making a greenhouse with Mike, who carves erotic phalluses (according to the local newspaper – he calls them mushrooms)

Because we stayed in Edinburgh I took the chance to get sailing gloves and a fog horn (testing it at 0530 every morning at the moment) from Port Edgar Chandelry and wandered around the modern art galleries (John Bellany’s paintings of Scottish fishing ports and Damian Hirst’s formaldehyded ewe) behind two hand holding men, I assumed they were an exhibit, when I stumbled across the Dean Cemetery – as there was a granite pyramid peeking over the cemetry wall just where I had parked my car.

The pyramid was only one of the delights in the graveyard though – exxotic monuments with birds standing on rams heads on top of winged lions, sleeping lions with owls watching over them and a monunment to John Irving from the Franklin Expedition (where they turned cannibal) with carved depiction of Erebus and Terror the two ships lost with all hands in the search for the North West Passage (where is Global Warning when you really need it). Delightful place to wander around on a very sunny day.

I got back home to find that I had scored 90% in my first celestial navigation exam so was very chuffed and celebrated with a chilled beer.