Another that brian remembers will never be used on the river again, thanks to the new laws of rubbish disposal: “One of our skippers used to point people up to where the Kingswear Dump was,” he tells me, “where, every thursday morning, they would burn the rubbish. He’d tell the passengers ‘ladies and gentlemen, if you look up above Kingswear now you will see smoke rising from england’s only active volcano, which erupts, regular as clockwork, at 11am every thursday.’ it would make us laugh!”
Current skipper of the Dart explorer, Steve Sherwin, said the commentary is something all skippers on the Dartmouth Steam railway and riverboat Company boats have to do, and that once you get over your nerves it can be really fun. “i was terrified before i did my first one, but now
it’s second nature,” he said. “we make jokes to keep things fun and if we catch people out that increases the enjoyment of many of our other passengers! we regularly ask people to switch off their mobile phones because it interferes with the steering, or that the fibreglass owl bird scarers on boats are real! One bloke took a load of pictures before i told him it was just fibreglass. He was a bit annoyed actually.” Steve’s tales of ‘Fibreous glasseous Owless’ notwithstanding, he has fun in other ways: “we tell people that the Anchorstone used to have nagging wives tied to it in the olden days, but they stopped it because it got too crowded,” he said. “i also regularly tell people that the totnes sheep couldn’t live on a field on the opposite bank because they have a set of legs on one side longer than the other so if they try and turn around they fall over!” brian said: “we all had little stories we used to make people laugh – of the dear old lady asking at Paignton station if the train stops at Kingswear, and the railway attendant says ‘i hope so, or there’ll be a bloomin big splash!’ “the skipper i learnt from used to tell people they were on the fastest ship in the world,” Andy said. ‘because in the Onedin line tv programme filmed here in Dartmouth, bayard’s Cove was liverpool, Kingswear was Hong Kong and the longwood at noss was the Amazon, so the Dartmouth ferry could go from liverpool to Hong Kong and back to the Amazon in five minutes! i came up with one which i was particularly proud of: there are meadows which flood upstream and they have cows in them. i used to tell people the cows ate seaweed and the farmers sold South Devon Salt beef around the world!”
Professional Aerial, Satellite & AV Specialists
“Commentaries are part of the job,’ said Steve. ‘You’ve got to make sure people enjoy their trip out –and if you do that most of the time you enjoy it too!”u By Phil Scoble
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