OK, I lied...but the sun went in so I may as well continue:-
Going back to the Gulf...or returning from it in a nasty monsoon season can make even the usaually benign Indian Ocean a tad uncomfortable. Tankers by their very nature have a low freeboard, so any little dollop of sea tends to wet the decks. Every now and again the parent of the little dollop comes along to keep an eye on the offspring. One such, very stealthily, came up and over our starboard side. Very quiet. No breaking water. But the sheer power was enough to buckle the foredeck catwalk and dislodge all the paint from the foremast in one go. The Chinese LOVE thick paint. This wave stopped them earning a lot of overtime chipping the paint off. This monsoon is a particularly "wet" one and the seas were a bit on the lumpy side. Still warm though. It was pretty normal to aim the ship at a rain squall and drive through it to give the ship a fresh water wash. The deck officers and the radio officer lived amidships and everyone else was aft. The lounge / bar is aft. The catwalks have wood walkways. Get slippy in the wet. Before the horrible advent of "videos", showing a film was a social highlight. Alas, no more. In wet weather "we" had to scuttle down the aft catwalk to avoid a drenching. Ship pitching, you slide. Forwards and backwards. Poor Radio Officer. Escaped getting wet but slid the wrong way, hurtled through the bar door and straight through the cinema screen during reel one. It took 2 months to get a new one accompanied by one of those "we do not understand" type of letters from MoD.
But not all was sweetness and light. The Chinese and Hygeine were mutually incompatible. Open the pantry fridge door to get the makings of a sandwich and you could be greeted by the insect version of the charge of the lLight Brigade. Still, the roaches didn't eat all that much.
Suki (the bosun) had, somewhere or other, attempted to increase the global population of the Chinese race. Naughty boy. But was suffering as a result. Silence and purple paint. Eventually he came to see his old pal Dr.Crippen. Poor sod. His cojones were about the same size as a good King Edward potato, and the other bit looked like a very large peeled purple parsnip. Oops. This is a bit beyond me I thought. Our nearest port at the time was Mauritious. They refused to help as they were an RN Station and therefore were not able to assist "non-RN personnel" Nice one guys. On my own again. Looking at my medical "chart", I (with the agreement of the local table tennis champion) decided "we" (meaning me) had to give him an injection of "something". I did not have at this stage a little box marked "testicular reduction". Mind you, it was fascinating to shine a torch through the "afflcted bits" and see what should have been the "working bits". It was just a bit of bad luck that he arrived at my cabin..sorry, "surgery", as was practising giving an injection to an orange. Come on, we all have to learn, and on what better than an ex major in Maos army? So he lay on my settee, bum towards me...ram sized thingies fortunately pointing away from me, but the bum was so tightly clenched that I would have better luck injecting a teak door. His fists were also tearing my settee covers to shreds, and this was not on!. So. Plan B. For proper treatment he was going to have to wait for week until we got back to Singapore. If this poor guy had been a European he would not have been able to walk, but in those days all Chinese (sailors, anyway) had legs as bent as a champion jockey he could just about manage a shuffle. So. I made him a sling to go around his neck and support the "afflited parts" (I think Ali-G copied the idea for his film). Then I got the ships carpenter....a tiny little guy called (true!) Wan "xxxxx"...to replace the bosuns cabin chair with a toilet seat....so he could sit more comfortably. So he was basically immobilised. Then I put a notice on the ouside of his cabin door telling the crew NOT to open the door, point and laugh. It was nearly 10 years before Suki and I became friends again, but then he got killed in a fight somewhere. A nice man.