The Ferry Was Twenty Minutes Late And Nobody On Board Agrees Why

I have crewed the same night ferry for six years. It is a ninety-minute run and it is so dull that we time it against a kettle.

On 3 November we left on the minute and arrived twenty minutes late. Calm water. No traffic. Engines never dropped below normal, and I would know, because I was standing next to them for the whole crossing, which is my entire job.

Fuel burn was normal for ninety minutes, not a hundred and ten. That is the fact I keep coming back to, and it is the fact that stops me sleeping. We were late by twenty minutes and we burned fuel like we were not.

The captain wrote it up as "current". There is no current there. He knows there is no current there.

The passengers are the part I have never told anybody outside my family. There were thirty-one. I helped with the vehicle deck, so I talked to a lot of them. One woman thanked me for the announcement about the lights, and there was no announcement about lights. A lorry driver I know by name asked if the fog had cleared, and there was no fog, and the man is not a joker; he was annoyed, the way you get annoyed at weather.

And a boy, maybe nine, asked his mother — I was two metres away, coiling a line — whether the "quiet men" were getting off with us. His mother told him to stop it. He said it again on the ramp.

I asked her, because I could not help it, what he meant. She looked at me the way you look at someone who is about to make your bad night worse, and she said: he sleepwalks, he has done it since he was small, and he always says that. Always the quiet men.

Then she took him to the car and did not look back.

So: twenty minutes, correct fuel burn, a flat sea, and thirty-one people carrying thirty-one different crossings.

I am not going to tell you what I think happened, because I do not know, and I would like to keep my licence. I am only telling you that when I am on that run now, at the same point every time, roughly halfway, I find myself looking up. And I never used to.