Silas Parks and the Incredible Fart

I do not want to use these memoirs as a means to portion out blame like a five course dinner but certainly on this occasion (and on many others) I feel that the truth must be told to free myself from the swamp that I found myself being sucked into.

The actual situation occurred before any inkling, knowledge or warning came to my attention. In hindsight I might have said that the cook was partially at fault for allowing us to run out of varied breakfast ingredients so early on in the trip. Half way across the Atlantic Ocean and we had been eating baked beans for breakfast, pork sausages in baked beans, and ravioli in baked beans and more recently just baked beans with baked beans. We had no eggs or bacon left, no black pudding or cereals to have a change from the fried and the baked beans.

I could also blame the Chief Officer for not having checked the cook's requirements and empty shelves, or the chandler for giving us the brand of beans that he did. The manufacturers of the baked beans could also be a suitable candidate for investigation: decaffeinated coffee is easily available and cheap so why can we not have had the option to buy 'defarted' beans?

I could even go so far as to blame the Venezuelan Patrol Boat Captain whose skills did not rise to his position and rank, but this is all after the event occurred and as I said before it is not my aim to blame. By writing this, I simply want to put my side of the story forwards, to clear my own name.

At the time that this particular incident arose, it was baked beans for breakfast or nothing at all!

How it all began
I think for clarity of the situation I must start right back at the beginning, when events started to occur that led up to this unusual situation and disastrous result and to the reason why I found myself sitting in a Venezuelan jail cell surrounded by the most villainous looking bunch of potential drug pushers and lice breeders imaginable.

One fine day of many we were seventeen souls crossing the Atlantic Ocean from the UK to Brazil: chugging along through fine seas to meet the horizon that managed just to keep that little distance away from us. Always there yet never close enough to touch. Happy Bob was doing the early morning watch (the four to eight) and I was doing the eight to twelve watches with Erdengo doing the twelve to four (the hot sun watch). And the trip was nearly over. By last nights reckoning I had calculated that we would be in port by three the next afternoon, tied up and half drunk by six pm at the latest.

That was the plan anyway and when I got up that morning with a slight sore head from the previous nights drinking session I followed my usual routine of shower, coffee, and the now dreaded plate of baked beans before toddling up to the bridge for the start of my watch.

Bobs very own farting machine .
I arrived at the bridge door still half asleep and suffering and in no shape or form did I imagine or expect what greeted me as I opened the bridge door. As I pushed the door wide the foulest smell hit me right in the pit of the stomach, a smell so putrid and sickly, so potent and nauseating that it took all of my courage to step further into the wheelhouse rather than turning tail and running for fresh air.

Holding my breath I looked desperately around for a possible sighting of a three week old dead kipper or a kid with a stink bomb and saw Happy Bob outside on the bridge wing.

Squashing my nostrils together I rushed through and out. I asked him quickly, "Bob, what the hell is that foul smell inside of the bridge?"

Bob, sucking furiously on a cigarette and standing as far as possible from the offending area without falling over the ships side said; "just a slight stomach problem it will clear up a bit later I hope".

"Well, just open up all the doors and windows as you leave, please and BOB" I said through lack of anything else to say. It is maybe not a good idea to light a cigarette up in your cabin with that amount of methane around", I added as an afterthought.

Bob departed the offending area having opened up all of the doors and windows as he went and within twenty minutes and after much re-checking I deemed it safe enough to re-enter.

The endless line of the horizon was now seriously disturbed with effects of solid land getting closer. Hills were by this time starting to take shape, and other vessels were drawing pretty lines on our radar. It was time to contact the port authorities for clearance and all the usual stuff that customs and immigration requires and I had already delayed this necessary contact until the smells had cleared and I could breathe without fear of gagging.

I started all of the necessary and I remained busy for the next hour or so as we drew closer to land and as buildings and the shape of a port began to be visible to the naked eye.

My very own farting machine
I was on the radio to this patrol boat that seemed to be using the whole ocean as a training field for the blind pilots association when I heard this massive gurgling sound that could have been the remaining water draining out of the pacific ocean though a twenty inch drain pipe.

Along with this previously unheard and awesome sound that could have drowned out an intercity train at full speed, came a long and uninterrupted fart that had potential to light up downtown New York for a week.

I am not saying that I have never farted before, I am just saying that what manifested itself on this occasion was well beyond normal expectations and well out with the boundaries of known records for size, sound and upset to the system. Everybody is subject to a slight pollution of the atmosphere around them whether they admit to it or not but what came out of my rear on this particular occasion, apart from its size and voracity was a smell that a skunk would have been proud of.

The smell that hit my nostrils could have had the potential to cut short Hitler's advance through Europe and would have made Saddam Hussein welcome in Bush to his country. Had I managed to capture this smell in a bottle stink bomb manufacturers would have gone out of business and my name would have been in the Guinness book of records - should they have farting achievement records. It was though impossible to even consider all of this when the situation arose and the only thought or possible body movement was a rush for the door and the fresh air that beckoned outside.

The Venezuelan Skipper on my Bow
In actual fact the smell was so bad that I was outside and sucking in air before I realized something, that I had dropped a task uncompleted, a task that certainly did not brook any delay on its completion. In all honesty it never really sank in that I should be doing something else until I saw the whites of the eyes of a Venezuelan skipper who most certainly should not have been onboard my boat at that exact moment in time.

To cut along story short and to rid myself of these upsetting memories, I had at the time of the foul smell release neglected to complete a conversation regarding courses and direction with the Captain of a Venezuelan Navy Boat. It was thus due to the unsure direction that he would have to take to avoid a collision that he chose to take the wrong one and thus he found my bows neatly wedged into the side of his vessel, just under his bridge wing where he had been standing.

I had in retrospect actually managed to drop two tasks that I had been in the process of doing, the first was as mentioned previously of plotting courses with the navy boat and the second was turning over the autopilot to hand steering.

I came to realize all of this just after the bows hit with a large smash and as the stricken vessels captain came head over heels off his bridge wing, from where he had been waving hysterically, and landed on my bow - just below my basin of fresh air that I was sucking into my lungs like it was going out of fashion.

The Venezuelan hell
It might have been that upon leaving the steering console my vessel swung off course and still being at full speed ended up pointing directly towards the Naval Boat, but I would still strongly question why the captain was standing waving his arms on the bridge wing of his boat when he should have been inside navigating his vessel safely. Maybe if he had been inside doing his job then I would not have found myself inside of a Venezuelan prison cell eating baked beans with my fingers and drinking water that was yellow in color.

Somehow having grasped the essentials of the accident my captors thought it funny to feed me a diet of baked beans for the duration of my stay. Baked beans with bread, baked beans with water: but the strangest thing about this was that I never managed to produce a fart again, not even a little squeak - much to their consternation. Maybe my system had shut down in fright or this South American Nation had managed to invent 'defarted beans', I know not, but luckily for me it did not produce any effects in my innards.

They gave me a lawyer after three months, he spoke no English and I only knew how to order a beer in Spanish. It went on for weeks. Weeks of endless days without a beer or drink to lighten up the situation, days of living in a filthy and damp cell with only my drug addicted cell mates for company. One "amigo" who spoke a mangled form of English informed me that they had found an empty bottle of whisky in my cabin after the event and I suppose this did not go towards helping my situation.

My Escape from Hell ..
After three months my lawyer suddenly appeared with a weedy guy who said he was the British consul. He said "sorry old chap, didn't know you where here" and a week after that I found myself on a plane home. In actual fact the consul told me that they had decided not to press charges, mainly because the navy found the whole situation amazingly funny. The judge was supposedly in hysterics when the jist of events was explained to him and he was unable to continue with the case. The consul also said that I had been very lucky due to the fact that they managed to salvage the Naval Boat without much effort - supposedly the fact that my vessels bows were wedged so tightly into the patrol boat prevented it from sinking there and then and they managed to bring both vessels into port and to safety without too much trouble.

The End ..
I am glad that somebody found it funny and that the situation had a lighter note. The owners of the vessel and my previous employers did not see any humor in the situation; in fact they fired me upon my return even though they received a huge whack of insurance returns for loss of time and for future repairs. I thus found myself on the streets without a job and with hardly enough money to buy a can of baked beans........ Not that I would have bought any if I could have.

So yes, I could have blamed the cook, the chandler or the Venezuelan boat Captain for his lack of attention to what was happening around him. But it is water under the bridge and as I explained before it is not my aim to discredit others or to portion out blame like a teacher giving homework but to put onto paper actual events as and when they come to me.

And you will see from above that I cannot in anyway be blamed for the events as they occurred and that the company was fully unjustified in releasing me from their services.