What A Fright

A Memory of Maesgeirchen.

I was working at Bangor Docks as a painter of a Trawler called the Brizley; it was a wooden boat of about forty feet long. I had to sleep on the boat within the crews cabin of which was below deck. Now the thing about Bangor docks was that when the tide went out the habour became a dry dock where one could walk on the sea bed? It was there that I could clean and scrape away the Barnacles, for me then to paint the hull. Now the Brizley was a very old trawler of which would spring a leak, so whenever the tide came in the boat would fill up with water. Seeing that there was water in both the bilge and also in the fish hold I managed to rig up a very long and thick rubber pipe of which I would syphon out all the excess water from both bilge and fish hold. It was proven to work successfully where all the water would pour out onto the seabed. Now I was to leave the rubber pipe still sucking the water out when I decided it was time for me to retire and go to bed. The tide was to start to come in and of course before long I was being rocked to sleep like a baby. Little did I know that the syphon began to reverse itself, instead of the water being sucked out from out of the pipe it was actually pouring back into the boat! You see the water level had rose where the pipe was now high above the water line. Anyway there I am inside me bed and then come the early hours I awoke and because there was no lighting within the cabin I'd have to light a torch. Anyway I stepped out of bed and suddenly was to get my feet wet; the sea water was above me ankles... what a fright! That evening because the whole of the Cabin was now saturated I was to bring an industrial gas heater down into the cabin and put it on at full blast to dry the cabin out. It would have been fine to be left on all night, there was enough air getting into the cabin. Things were to change though; you see there was an iron lid of which suddenly shut itself due to the rocking of the boat. I was asleep when this had happened and the next thing I knew was that I was to find myself waking up with a huge pain in my head. The gas heater had starved the cabin with oxygen, where I was to feel dizzy, this feeling lasted for over a month where I could not keep my balance.

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