This is a favorite game on SALTS - but only those that have sailed with Stephen Duff have truly seen it performed to perfection.

WARNING - SPOLIER
- If you are about to sail with SALTS - then you probably shouldn´t read this story as it will give away the best part of the game (I´m assuming it´s still done)!

On with the story...

The game goes thusly:
The skipper announces that the ship will be receiving an important visitor (usually named King Ugga Bugga Boo) from <insert fake exotic location here> and that he needs 3 volunteers (read victims) for an elaborate greeting ceremony.

The rules of the greeting are simple - everything that the King does must be repeated back with the same energy and vigor.

The three are then escorted back aft while everyone else is briefed on what is really going to happen ;) The king will basically perform a bunch of loud and crazy screaming jumping up and down actions (which in itself is quite funny to watch the poor victim try to imitate) but at a given signal (usually a tap on the nose or something) the King will do a hard jump and then plop down on the bench (hard) - at which point a pre-selected accomplice slides a wet sponge under the posterior of the current victim - to the amusement of all...

Now, that was all just background...


Enter Mr. Duff - the all time master of King Ugga Bugga (the name being his invention)

Duff is a big chap and loves to dress up - he is famous for other characters such as "Sheriff Goober" and "Rumpold" of Barnaby and Rumpold - but I digress (that´s another story)

If Duff was on board - the King always made an appearance - and every time the costumes became more elaborate - culminating in the full King costume (complete with makeup) pictured below.

More to come...

nope but i have been on a trip once during mug up when skipper was telling every a scary story in the dark when some one on deck dropped a dummy throught the windows which i think made half the boat jump out their skin..it was really quite funny looking back...not so much at the time though haha

Ah that would be the story from "Cradle of the Deep" - the one about John Henry loosing an arm - sound familiar?

I am actually in the process of scanning in that entire book (the copyright has elapsed and since it´s out of print is is VERY hard to find) I will be posting it to this site when I´m done.

I have read that many times to many crews - the dummy is a standard - sometimes even accompanied by setting off flash bulbs from cameras - we even got the bench load of people at the hold table to fall over once in fright (Bwhahahaha) :D

Actually the best it was ever done was at Pioneer Pacific Camp on Thetis Island. The then manager, Dave Roycroft, and I planned to scare everyone - it was quite an elaborate ploy - I read the story and we got a friend of Dave´s to walk by the window (this was at dusk) pretending to only have 1 arm - of course all the camp staff were in on it and feigned ignorance, pretending not to have seen the mysterious stranger. We concluded the evening with a trumped up ´warning´ that a lunatic had escaped from a near-by asylum (which if you know Thetis Is. pop ~ 300 is pretty comical in itself) anyway by about 11pm things were pretty bad with kids barricaded up in their cabins and even the parents had bought into it - we eventually had to make rounds with the "stranger" to prove it was a fake so that people would go to sleep!

then again, the chain saw wake-up call at 5am for the older campers was a good one too... - but that´s another story...