#76 Brian Gerrish

I've been a professional mariner for 30 years and have sailed to many countries and never encountered any issue with UK authorities up until today.

That is when I was storing ship in the supermarket in Leamington and got a call from my wife saying that customs are here and they're saying we've not done the correct paperwork for going to the Channel Islands and coming back.

and they want to come on board the boat and you know what do i do and anyway they were still there when i got back and it turned out that we were supposed to have told them that we were leaving the uk and i said just said well i didn't know sorry and you know where where's the form can we fill it out and he said oh no it's too late for that and again and so he kept saying that he wanted to come on board the boat and i said well why do you want to come on board the boat what purpose do you, what do you want to achieve by coming onto the boat? And he didn't really have an answer.

And eventually he said, oh, I want to check your paperwork.

I said, well, thanks to the UK government, you've made everything online now.

So all the paperwork is online.

So I've got it here on my phone if you want to check any paperwork and He had three sort of female subordinates with him, and he was a rather nasty piece of work, a bit of a rat-like Jobsworth figure, the kind of person I suppose you'd expect in figures of authority, and a very unpleasant encounter.

And after it, I mean, we got away with it eventually, he left us be, we said we'd go and make sure we read up on it and knew the rules.

But this rule, new rule about reporting when leaving the UK came into force only in 2022.

So no wonder that I'd never heard of it.

And even the Limington Harbor boat had never heard of it.

And it seems I've been making various calls today and almost no one's heard of it, but it seems it was maybe, and if you can't think when 2022 was, we're in the aftermath of COVID and I've asked Google and AI how this came in and they claim it's to do with Brexit, which doesn't really make any sense in regards to the Channel Islands because the Channel Islands were never in the EU.

So it seems just an excuse for the British government harvesting data.

And I guess sailors were one of those groups of people who clung on to their freedom in Covid.

There's these wonderful stories of sailors who just sailed off to escape lockdown.

I myself sailed away from Scotland to escape the Scottish rules to get down to England.

And then we have again the noose tightening regulations being introduced quite, would I say, surreptitiously under the radar.

And I just found this really quite disturbing, I have to say.

And the fact that, yeah, it's all there on the UK government's website.

So yeah, you're now supposed to use this technology to tell the government anytime you plan a voyage outside the UK.

And yeah, it just seems that one of our last vestiges of freedom is being taken away.

The government have obviously decided that sailing boats are this kind of anomaly, which they can't easily control.

And they're doing their best to use digital technology, much like IDs and everything else to try and sort of close that little outlet that people have of perhaps avoiding the scrutiny, which governments can easily achieve at airports and ports and other points of entry.

I suppose that reminded me of you and the fact that UK Column News was a great outlet for people during COVID and it was sailing.

There was an outlet for me and many others.