Tinned pilchards.

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[Trampship Man]

This has nothing whatsoever to do with Ship Sim.  However, I`ve seen posts about 
Eurovision song contest and various other topics also having nothing to do with Ship Sim, so `here goes` !   Besides there just may be one or two `old salts` out there who may appreciate this.                                                                                                    Long long ago in those dark days of BOT ration scales [your pound and your pint], sailormen often went hungry.     There existed in those dark days a shipping company known as the `Baron Line` [Hungry Hogarths of Glasgow].   A staple foodstuff  MUCH USED in ALL their ships was `tinned pilchards` which came in oval tins something like 8”x 4” in size.  If  I remember rightly it was one tin between 3 men.
    We were issued with these tinned pilchards so frequently that we became thoroughly sick of them, so that eventually whether hungry or not we used to just hurl the tins unopened straight `over the side`.   I  think it probable that maybe thousands  of these tins were dumped by`Baron Boat` men all over the world.     In fact, a one time friend of mine [now deceased]  Kriegsmarine Kapitan Otto Rhinehart, told me that during the war `Baron  Boats` were very easily tracked by `Uboats`.   `Uboats` fitted with downward looking periscopes and powerful lights simply followed the tinned pilchard trails along the sea bed.   Simple !
         Does anyone out there remember those `tinned pilchards`

Regards,
Ken.

[saltydog]

On a different side: I was watching "Coast" on the BBC yesterday, and they showed how desperate the English were to find a way to detect Geman submarines in British waters in WW1.. One idea was to stuff a lot of pilchards into an open model of a submarine and tow it behind a ship.  This free meal of fish would then attract seagulls that would flock around it as they do around a fishing boat and eventually teach them to associate a submarine with food..
A flock of seagulls could then in the future mean a submarine was there..
However this idea did not work. The seagulls weren't interested, and a while later ASDIC came along..