Wherefore art thou?

Getting Romeo’s coordinates wrong

A recent meeting with an old captain of mine brought to mind a whole lot of true nautical stories of yore. My favourite one is about an incident which took place way back in 1970.

We were in Cochin with Captain Malia commanding the naval base at Venduruthy. My dear friend Rolly Lewin and I were on the captain’s staff. Some ships of the Fleet from Bombay were visiting Cochin and it was decided to schedule an exercise at which the Fleet ships were to attack our base while the Cochin-based ships were to intercept them before they could carry out their attack. Detailed exercise orders were prepared. As it happened, our senior ship, Godavari, was already at sea while the other ships were in harbour. The latter were handed over the orders in plain language before they sailed but for reasons of security, orders to Godavari were encrypted and transmitted on wireless.

One of the key requirements was for Godavari to meet the other friendly ships and proceed together for the interception. Accordingly, a rendezvous point with certain latitude and longitude coordinates was designated in the orders where the two were to meet at a specified time. This point was designated RR which was phonetically referred to as ‘Romeo Romeo’.

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The exercise commenced and soon Godavari signalled that she was at RR awaiting the other ships which in turn signalled that they were at RR looking for Godavari. Both the units were asked to check and recheck the correctness of their positions which they confirmed emphatically after using all possible navigational means! All concerned were baffled that if both were at Romeo Romeo, why couldn’t they sight each other?

Eventually, they were asked to proceed independently for the interception and the exercise terminated without the two ever meeting.

The usual debrief took place after the ships’ return to harbour. Only then was it discovered that some error had crept into the encrypted transmission of the orders to Godavari whereby she had coordinates different from those given to the other ships in plain language.

The piece de resistance was when Captain Malia summed up the situation by saying that the previous night he was reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and visualising the ships going round and round at sea uttering Juliet’s immortal lines, “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”

That really brought the house down!

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