2005
OUR CANAL BOAT IN HOLLAND
from Amsterdam to Sneek. (All is
not roses)
We had just come up
from the Normandy Coast, where it was kind of hot, this being June. By the time
we got to Amsterdam it was Damn hot plus a very high Humidity. We hopped on a ancient two car train, left
over from WW2 I believe as it was a traveling antique. Our car, sparsely
occupied, had no openable windows as well as no air conditioning. This was not
what we had in mind when we signed on for this Holland trip. This torture went on for about three hours,
when we arrived at the Sneek Station, we were released to the exterior, which
was not that much cooler, but we could actually breath again. We called the taxi company on a phone, they
picked us up in about 15 minutes, to drop us off at the boat landing, before we
let them go we had them drop two of us off at the nearby grocery market so we
could load up on supplies for our week long trip. We had asked them to return
in an hour, in order to take us back to the
boat. We unloaded, got the low-down on how to run the boat. And I got to the driving area inside, while the ladies
were mostly topside, messing with the lines. However, I noticed we were moving
out of our docking area and realized BJ was driving the boat but didn’t really
know how. You can’t drive from both
positions so I ran around to the upper position to see what in hell was going
on. BJ was happy to be moving so I assisted on making a starboard, then a port
turn to extricate us out of port. This
was an expensive boat and with three staterooms, toilets, galley and salon,
probably cost around €100.000,.
And I began to wonder if our insurance covered anything near
that.
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| Our boat, 3 staterooms |
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| Our competition |
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| Collecting tarrif |
These boats have a
governor on them so we couldn’t go too fast but we cruised along, thru a couple
of bridges that would swing up to let us thru. But when we got to a small town
of Bruggeld there was a guy on the bridge
with a fishing pole with a small wooden shoe on it dangling it if front of each
boat as we passed. What the f--- was that all about we wondered, until ignoring
him as we passed, he started hollering at us and running down along the
canal. We figured something was amiss,
so we pulled over to inquire about the hub-bub. He was the bridge operator and
wanted us to give him the €1,40 (They use a comma instead of a period here) required
for our passage. This was new to us as it was always free on the French canals.
Again, I was reminded of the old saying
“Going Dutch”.
Well, since we had already
moored, why not run over to nearest market for supplies (Cold Beer, etc.).
We unloaded a couple of bicycles so BJ and I could find a
store, but wouldn’t you know it, my front wheel was flat. Undaunted, I was able to pedale around town
even on the flat until we got to the
edge of town, (two blocks?), without seeing a market. It didn’t do any good to
ask as not many speak English on these backways. But coming back, BJ hollered
out “this could be one”, and it did look a bit different from the usual house
so we went in. All we saw in this small room was a meat case. We asked if they
had any milk. Sure. How about beer? Of course, the proprietor went into the
back and brought a out a couple of six packs of Heineken and a cardboard bottle
of milk, After going thru about six items that were all in the back I asked if
he had a tire pump. Well, of course he did and brought it out, pumped up my
tire. Wow, what a full service place for one disguised as nothing.
Sometimes there are
disappointments. While sitting and sweating on our boat we spied a Utility
building across the harbor which had a sign hung above it ‘Douche” . Well, we all
knew what that meant so we donned our bathing suits, fast walked abound to the
bridge , with visions of a cool shower
in our minds. When we got to the Douche sign, it was over a Hose Bibb, about 12 inches
above the grass. We looked around and indeed, this was it. To hell with it,
cold water is cold water so we managed to get enough water on us , without any
buckets or hoses to splash around and give us about ten minutes of cooler
lifetime.
These were only
inconveniences, but for a real thriller, our next episode was hard to beat.
After a few days in this port of the little town of Elburg, we packed up and
moved out. About the same time a huge
rainstorm came on us and I mean huge.
Well, water is no problem for us as we slowly sailed out of the entry
canal. Because it was raining so hard I was inside, below, but discovered there
was something wrong with the steering. I
did know that there is a small red light on the bulkhead that to show whether the controls are connected to
below or topside. Since it was off, I ran up to the other control and wheel but
could not get much response as there is not much rudder action when you are
moving slowly in the water. This would
not be much of a problem if we weren’t in the middle of a well traveled canal with large yachts and other
boats motoring in and out of the small harbor. The wind was moving us around so as to block
the channel, much to the chagrin of the other boats. We all did our best running around on the
boats edge in order to fend off bashing into other boats, moored and afloat. It
was apparent we were in distress, but it was raining so hard we couldn’t hear
much if anyone could speak English.
Since we were
unfortunately at the end of the quai, we weren’t able to jump off and tie up to
a bollard. Some one eventually saw our predicament, and ran down the bank to
grab one of our lines and pull the bow around so other boats could pass in and
out . We managed all this without
damaging any other boat which stills seems miraculous. As soon as we had secured the boat I ran back
to the public phone (Don’t forget, this
was 2005, before cell phones!) and called Home Base and was told the mechanic
would be over in about an hour. It was
still morning and he did appear in about half an hour, having driven from a
near-by base of the boat company. After investigating the problem, he said “Oh, this is really
simple, this red light was burned out and didn’t register which control station we were
activating’. No shit, Sherlock, is that all?
After getting all
that untangled we cruised out of the
port to our next stop at Kamdem. However, we traversed a couple of Inland
Meer’s which are very shallow but the Dutch
dredge the channels to about seven feet deep and mark them all with the red and
green buoys to mark your roadway. However, my navigator gave me a wrong turn
direction and we found ourselves grounded in about three feet of water, but we
are in a huge lake with the shorelines several hundred meters away. It was a bit intimidating as being that far
out, it doesn’t seem possible we are in such shallow waters. We stirred up a lot of mud with the propeller
and hoped we didn’t damage it much. When
we got through hollering and accusing each other, we finally had to get off the
boat and push it backward a few meters to deeper water. What is it about being in the water, we never
think about the life jackets until it’s all over.
A BOOKLET REVIEW
CANDIDE by Voltaire
Since I considered
myself a Francophile, I was chagrined that I had never read one of Frances most
revered authors. After all, we had spent a lot of hours walking along the Seine
River on the Quai de Voltaire, passing
his house there in Paris. So when I saw
the book appear at the Graton Post Office (We exchange books there) I snatched
it up even though it was a paperback on it’s last days. I taped the back cover back on and delved into a pretty extraordinary mind.
Written in the mid 1700’s, this could almost be called Science Fiction (Without
the Science). It appears to be a satire
of the problems he had with those in authority at that time in France, as he
was exiled several times in his lifetime, finally settling in an area on the
Swiss border, virtually starting a small town called Ferney. He naturally makes a lot of fun of the
churches and their ministers. But the big surprise were the half dozen drawings
by one Shielah Beckett, illustrating
some aspects of the story. Lots of sex! I assume the drawings were inserted in the
1959 printing of Bantam Books, although they certainly reflect the verse..
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| Candide |
BOOK REVIEW 2
100 Ways America
is Scewing up the World. The author, John Tirman, is no lightweight, is
executive director of MIT’s Center for
International Studies , so he seems have a pretty good background for all his
rants. Just a fe of the 110 are: Earth’s
Climate, Television. Cold War ,Dumbing Toxins, Blood for oil, Nuclear
Weapons, and so on, . But at least he
presented 1o0 reasons that we helped the World.
SMART FIRELINE
We Americans spend billions a year to invent, produce and
deliver Death to thousands of people every year. I’m addressing only the portion of our
Military who hire our Industrial giants that is so successful in pinpointing a
particular corner in Iraq or any
unfortunate country that has lots of people who hate the other half. I’ve heard that most of this death from
the sky is controlled in Australia. Is that possible?
If that is possible, then how about trying
this out? Let’s have a program, funded by the Federal Government ( Let’s take
10 Billion a year from the Military budget)
that will design and develop a
system of delivering some kind of water/fire retardant/ stopper directly to the
fire line? Come to think of it, better
not use any government entity but hire a
private company like Tesla, who can hire real innovative thinkers, or
maybe even some Dutch designers.
Just imagine the
scenario! A Wild fire reported just
outside your city limits! Call the FEMA
folks who are standing by for a disaster
to strike, They fly out their drones, from a giant storage building in
central United States to the nearest airport to the fire. They set the drones up, activate their infra-red, heat source
identification systems, load them with
the magic material (Look, it cost billions of dollars to invent this,
right?) The controleers whip out their
Joy Sticks (does this sound dirty?) and go to work. I suppose some of these drones would be
destroyed as designed when used but
larger ones could drop and re-fill just
like manned coppers nowadays, except you might have a better retardant to
use, and not just water or
retardant. We got really good at
dropping a linear inferno of Hell upon the countryside in Vietnam, maybe we
could utilize some of those scenarios to stop a fire instead of starting
them?
BREAKING NEWS !! (From 1940)
THIS JUST IN…. Have you ever
wondered why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941? It must have been a
Top Secret note as I have never heard in the last seventy five years why they did. A
recent story in the Smithsonian Magazine noted that Japans rapacious grab for
China plus a couple of bites into French Indo-China resulted in a Western
Economic Sanctions imposed on Japan, the most critical being an oil embargo from the United States. Also, Navy brass new that there could be hostilities
between us and the Japanese and had sent
out memos to all bases regarding that. I always did wonder how our guns and
planes were loaded and ready when we were attacked.
OTHER AMAZING NEWS
I had always heard
that the French troops were a sorry lot and had no spirit for warfare in the
same war and the previous one. But I am
reading a book by a British secret agent who spent years in French occupied
areas working with the French underground. Heslop’s account in “XAVIER” (his
code name) sheds a quite different light
on the courage of the provocatieers, wives and children who led outwardly
normal lives but always faced with capture, torture and death by German
troops. There were three groups that
were organized during the war: One;
German troops, mostly there to thwart invasion in the Mediterranian,
Second; An organization of Frenchmen ( Groupes Mobiles de Reserve or GMR) well armed with sufficient
training as soldiers , and Third: the
Milice, from Frenchmen who had little love for the patriots and were very
dangerous. Against these were the
patriots or Maquis (Ma Qee), whosabotaged
as much as they were capable, blowing up
trains, tracks, factories, supplied by
air drops from Britain. If that were not
enough, there was always animosity between certain factions of political
parties, who were thinking mostly of their role when the Germans were evicted. This could be very dangerous at times for the
Maquis work. (The Gaulists and the Communists).
