Things that go POOT in the night

One of the things about the sea is that it’s full of ships going back and forth all the time. Seeing as I’m sitting at my desk all day staring out at the sea when I should be working, I get to see a fair bit of marine traffic. The shipping lanes are pretty close and every now and then you get a really massive ship sliding by and the effect is quite startling. Just so long as they don’t take a wrong turn and smash into our town like in Speed 2. Occasionally there are really really massive tanker types moored out in the bay like that spaceship that hovers malevolently over Johannesburg in District 9. Over on a neighbouring island is a series of huge hangers nestled in a fold of the mountains that look like something in a James Bond movie, as if a huge rocket ship might sidle out at any moment. The sea is like one big movie set really.

But mostly it’s the ferries chugging doggedly along going poco-poco-poco-poco taking huge flat barges loaded with huge pieces of metal down to the shipyards further down the coast. The other day I spotted two barges pushing the entire back half of a ship:

I probably need to get out more often.

Anyway, when it’s foggy the ships all get going on their horns. This morning was a real pea-souper — I could actually see the fog rolling in across our garden — and there was a great deal of pooting going on out in the bay. At one point there was even a high poot and an answering low poot going back and forth like in Close Encounters (just the single note obviously, as opposed to a five-note cadence with pleasing structural resolution, but I guess it’s the best they can manage). Which is all very well although five in the morning was a tad early for my liking. Couldn’t you transport those things some other time? At least it makes a change from traffic noise, of which there is virtually nil around here. And while we’re at it, there are NO leaf blowers in our corner of Japan, heaven be praised. I’ll take pooting at five in the morning over those stupid leaf blowers any day.