"We are not 'sailors', 'yachtsmen', 'yachties' or 'stink-potters': we are navigators!" So says Harold LaBorde, Trinidad's premier circumnavigator.

So we navigators of the 21st century should all get along and enjoy the two thirds of the planet that is water. Not so. Today a rather lavish 'super yacht' has dropped anchor 150 metres away from our schooner. A wonderful sight. Down goes the transom and, from the 'garridge', three jet-skis appear and a fast, 80 horsepower outboard-powered inflatable dinghy. This is a big day!

From the marina to the bay, this gleaming motor yacht has voyaged a distance of one mile... Apart from the somewhat dubious anchoring technique employed - quarter of a ton of anchor let loose with half a ton of chain dropped directly on top of it, there is the little matter of a large radar spinning inexorably, hours after the boat has come to a standstill. This machine emits rays and I don't know if it's as dangerous as some people like to think, but being around them upsets a lot of people who know about cancer, and the fact that the occupants of whole areas around mobile telephone beacons tend to drop dead after three years of being exposed to the rays might give one pause for thought. My wife is most concerned.

Visibility in this bay, at 2pm on a summer's day, is good. Very good.

I assume at this time that the captain's first mate, deck hand, hostess and cook would all notice if the vessel were dragging. The wind speed is only 7 - 10 knots. In other words, the captain has set up the GPS 'interface' with the radar, so that an alarm will go off if the yacht does drag, as though he were preparing the yacht for the night, in the knowledge that all will be asleep and nobody will see the land slipping past if the anchor starts to drag across the sea bed!

Looking at this £6,000,000 Med toy (forget making Atlantic crossings in this showpiece) I think to myself that the skipper obviously believes that people are in awe of his one-and-a-half metre swirling appendage and I reckon I should get in our dinghy, pop over there and suggest he add his bow-thruster, stern-thruster and secondary radar scanner to the display, whilst his jet-skis pirouette around his carbon footprint, circled by the powerboat to the amplified strains of the can-can. Unfortunately, his 4 communication domes (or 'big balls' as my wife would have it) are pretty static. Instead, I get into the dinghy, go across and politely ask him to turn the radar off as it is distressing my wife and can hardly be deemed a necessity.
There, rests a tale... No response.

Alas, at my age, I am no longer able to pick the skipper up by the collar and the seat of his pants and put him in the water and, anyway, the law would be on his side. So, common decency and politeness aside, the law permits him to fry our brains and guffaw with impunity. Or are these rays maybe good for us?

To find out, maybe I should stand in front of my radar scanner for seven hours a day, for a month, and let you know the outcome, if I still have a brain with which to do so...