Ferry Tales

Ferry Tales

Practically everyone who has ever joined my website will know by now that I used to travel a great deal on the ferries at Dover a few years back. The reason for this was the concentration of club machines on the boats and the huge amounts of money that could be won in a few days sailing. This page is not about Dover, but about the 1 week cruise I took in October 98 with a mate, Gus, who won the trip at work. He asked me to go along as he figured there might be plenty of chances to gamble, which there was as you will read later on. Well it all started at Gatwick at 6am with a pint. This was the start of a very long day and quite a few beers. By 6pm we had flown to Palma and were aboard the 'Sapphire' for our 1 weeks cruise around the Med.

The way these cruises work is that you sail overnight from port to port and you spend each new day in a new city/country. Due to the liscensing laws you may only gamble while you are at sea which is from about 8pm to 8am. So the first day we got on the boat we crashed out immediately and got up at 4am (while no one else was about) to check the fruit machines out. We were pleasantly surprised, at least I was, I think they all looked the same to Gus!

We started with one of my all time favourite fruit machines - CASH ON THE NILE. Hmm, not backing but £10 short of full. After £10 exactly I got the Nile roll (1,2,11,12 type hi-lo climb) to the jackpot. Some idiot must have collected a tenner when it was about to drop. The other Nile proved a little harder costing £100 to get the £200 but now we were showing good profit. The next fruit machine we hit was the RAGS TO RICHES, one of my favourite Crystal machines. It cost £10 to get the first feature but it climbed straight to Jackpot Spins for the cashpot, which just goes to show how badly some people play club machines. And I must also admit that this was quite lucky to get it so cheap! But this is a machine that loves to win on middle numbers and still your average punter will not go higher than anything but a 'safe number'. Sadly there was no afterplay, must be because it came out so cheap. I then nicked a few 20's from the CLUB TROPICANA'S and we called it a day as we were coming into port in Italy. The first morning showed £500 profit exactly (left).

That evening we kicked some butt at Roulette with some of our winnings. This was the American roulette wheel so my normal '7 and the neighbours' bet now included number 32, which the croupier hit quite happily many times, including a treble hit on number 20. Sadly the table limit was very low so even after double doubling the bet we were at the maximum which was £2 on the number and £4 on the splits. Still, we won another £600 and got very drunk. The following evening we did the remaining machines which included 3 ALL IN A DAYS WORK by Global. All Global machines are fairly simple if you know the key to how their gamble works. Two showed a healthy profit and one was levels. We also did the AROUND THE WORLD by Global. A fruit machine I don't really like but the cashpot was ready and we got it for £70, which if you know this machine, is rediculously cheap! There was also a CLUB TYPHOON and HELLS BELLS on board but these were turned off the whole trip.

Near the end of our trip we called in at Monte Carlo. This picture (left) is me standing at the entrance to the Casino. I went inside with Gus and blew £200 in about 10 minutes on Roulette. Guess what the first two spins were - 20 and 32. Unfortunately these are french wheels and the neighbours of 7 are 12, 18, 28 and 29! We did have one last stroke of luck on the boat. There was a CLUB TRAILBLAZER in the arcade also and I noticed the cashpots were always on £60 and £30 when it powered up. This was because the machine was fairly old and the battery backup had failed.