Completely unrelated but when I was a kid my Dad was a chief engineer in the Merchant Navy, he took the whole family away on a 3 month trip when I was 7 years old. We were in the middle of the Atlantic, chugging along, not seen any other sign of life for around a week, and there randomly was the USS Nimitz, sailed quite close to it, now we were on a huge gas tanker but the Nimitz was just huge, breathtaking. One of my earliest memories.
Liverpool used to have a player with the same turning circle as an oil tanker, his name was Poulsen!
My Uncle Tommy used to be in the Merchant Navy, and used to tell me some great stories. He was a young lad and they were sailing in the Panama area and he and his mate spotted a luxury yacht adrift, they managed to lasso it and haul it in. The ship towed the yacht back to port where the owner was waiting. Apparently maritime law states that if you salvage a vessel in open sea, you become its owner, my uncle and his mate didn't know the law as they were so inexperienced. Anyway the owner turns up at the ship and the captain calls them to his cabin, the owner asks how much cash they want. Assuming it was simply reward money and being young lads, they just say to him, 'oh just give us a couple of hundred dollars', and the owner snatched their hand off. Afterwards the captain says to them how they could have pushed for more and charged him thousands, as he explained the details of the rules. I don't think they were that arsed and just blew the money on Pizza and beer whilst on shore leave!
