103

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.

                                                   

Our boat, 3 staterooms

Our competition

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..

                                                               

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).