In 1970, I courted a young lady, Rosalind was her name; she came to me by courtesy of my dad, who was courting her mother, Freda, as my real mother had passed away some six years earlier. I met Rosalind when picking up my dad one night to take him home, as he did not drive. We hit it off straight away and began to go out together. As a consequence of her mother's divorce, her father had decided to relocate to the Island of Bermuda as he had landed a plum job on the Island as the chief Auditor for Bermuda, working for the British Government.

Rosalind loved her dad, and after a couple of years, she asked me if I would take her out there to see him. So we saved up our pennies and after 18 months we had enough to put a sizeable deposit on a 2 week package holiday which we duly booked and committed to paying the balance weekly before we went, and so after two and a half years, we set off on our adventure of a lifetime.
Both of us, equipped with the latest stylish wardrobe in our suitcases, hit the tarmac on British Airways on the 17th of June 1970, bound for Hamilton, Bermuda.

On landing, it was 35 degrees, and very pleasantly warm. Rosalind's Dad was there to meet us at the Airport, and he was a very nice man and treated me with a great deal of respect. He took us to our hotel, the Buena Vista on Harbour Road in Paget. This hotel is no longer there, as the original owner grew too old to run it and could not afford the upkeep costs, so it was eventually sold to a company for housing its workforce but was never treated kindly and became run down, so sad. However, during our stay, we decided to splash out on hiring a fast motor boat to tour the beauty spots of Cambridge beaches and Flatts, and the area around Hamilton Harbour, this we did from Bermuda Boat Rentals at Cavello Bay.

Cavello Bay sits on the edge of The Great Sound, a body of water that had to be crossed in order to get to the Capital Town of Hamilton (Hamilton is the capital of Bermuda, but it sure ain’t big enough to be called a city). Within the Great Sound, there are many small islets that form a kind of gateway through which the huge cruise liners have to pass in order to drop their thousands of visitors at Hamilton Harbour. We were told in no uncertain terms to avoid the main gap in this island chain and to take the long way round. This we intended to do notwithstanding the calamity which was about to beset us. We were taught briefly how to operate the boat and were pointed in the right direction, which ultimately was no use at all. Thinking that with a boat as fast as the one we had hired that in a few minutes we would be in the shady boulevards of Hamilton we set off across the Great Sound. Hamilton just happens to be on the other side of the Great Sound to Cavello Bay, so it was at some point in our journey necessary to cross the main shipping lanes, again no problem, we had a very fast boat, so should be able to outrun anything bearing down on us (oh yeah).

The first ten minutes went very well until we were bang in the middle of the Great Sound, at which point, although our engine was working perfectly, we suddenly had no forward propulsion and were therefore dead in the water. Ok, no problem, I can row it - slight problem, only one oar for a boat that is ten feet wide and 25 feet long, not easy, only going to go round in circles. We are adrift in the shipping lane, no propulsion, no food, Rosalind in a bikini, me in trunks with a shirt on and a rudder which was useless unless you were going forward. So I went into emergency mode, waving my shirt at every passing boat on the water, getting more sunburnt with every wave of my shirt. We were out there for over an hour, hoping against hope that we would not drift into the path of one of the large vessels, which would probably not see us until it was too late.

After much frantic waving, we managed to attract the attention of a local fishing boat who came alongside to help, we showed him that although our engine was working that the propellor was not going round and he said it looks like the shear pin has broken, this is a pin which connects across the engine shaft and the propellor and makes the propellor spin round driving the boat forward.
The fisherman fortunately was going inshore with his catch and offered to tow us back in to Cavello Bay, we gratefully accepted the lift albeit disappointed that our main trip would end this way, it took us nearly two hours to get back into Cavello Bay as we were against the wind, tide and Current, this also had not been explained to us by the boat hirers, it was a very leisurely trip back.
The boat company did offer to give us another boat for the next day, but we politely refused, preferring to get our money back and not to take the risk of being cast adrift again.

We did end up having the holiday of a lifetime, most of which was paid for by the British Government, which, as we did not remain together after we got back to England, would likely never be repeated.

But there is a very good moral to this story, it is not always good to have a fast boat, perhaps one with less speed will get you to where you want to go without breaking the shear pin, a 5 millimetre steel shaft which makes the propellor turn round, the failure of which was all it took to cast us adrift in middle of the main shipping lane of the Great Sound of Bermuda.