Bladder

A few weeks ago I was sailing in a Salcombe yawl with my brothers. We were on the water pretty much all day, we only came ashore to drink a few pints and buy pasties in the middle of the day. By the middle of the afternoon a practical matter of seamanship had become pressingly urgent. How do you pee off a Salcombe yawl? The curvature of the hull means that you can't stand anything like close enough to the side to aim over the gunwhales. The stern decks is too wide and there's a mizzen sail in the way. The boat isn't big enough or stable enough to stand on the side deck. My brother managed to half-stand-half-kneel with one foot inside the boat and one knee on the side deck, it just about worked but it was awkward and ungainly. I was told to go into the bailer and then tip it over the side. Initially this seemed luxurious – I could turn by back on the rest of my family and lean against the mast for support. I discovered soon afterwards that the bailer was about 10% smaller than the capacity of the human bladder. "Two bailer" is now a colloquial term for the highest level of urinary urgency.

Richard "stem the flow" B