More about our time in Amsterdam..... Exploding engines, screaming baby, and other happenings.

After some time living happily on Mjojo in Sixhaven, we decided to move to a cheaper mooring, so we wandered around the water's edges of Amsterdam, and found a place that seemed to meet our needs, and was much cheaper than Sixhaven, a ship yard on Nieuwendammerdijk in Amsterdam North, so we untied Mjojo and motored happily off to our new home in the northern half of Amsterdam.

There the three of us (Jake, Lotty and I) got on with or lives peacefully enough, Lotty still working for Elsevier, I happily making models on Mojo and Jake simply doing what some babies do.... i.e never sleeping for more than about 2 hours at a time, and screaming his head off whenever we tried to get him to go to sleep.

Jake actually asleep

Our stay on this mooring was cut short in rather dramatic fashion, one night at about 1 a.m the ship yard went up in flames. All very dramatic with fire engines, police and huge flames.

We hurriedly cast Mjojo loose and motored out to the middle of the harbour and sort of bobbed around there while the fire was being dealt with.

Burning ship yard

In due time the fire was out and we returned to our mooring, but the following day it became apparent that we would have to move, as the ship yard was finished, so we simply motored across that little harbour and tied on on a jetty used by professional bargees next to Nieuwendammerdijk (the road), and tied up there among professional barges, and there we stayed for the following years.

A very good move, as it brought us into contact with professional bargees, which was fun and educational too, and we also started to make Dutch friends as well, several of whom are still friends after all these years, most notably, Ivo de Wijs (a very well known Dutch cabaret writer and performer), his wife Elleke and son Teun, who was about the same age as Jake, who lived directly opposite this jetty.

Ivo's house is the dark one opposite us

I have to add a sort of note here, to say that to be honest, I am not really sure of the chronology of a lot of important things on our lives in this general period, so I shall probably place events in the wrong time frame here, but what the hell, does it really matter if something happened in 1975 or 1977? What matters is that they happened, and as things tend to do, they all had consequences.

So, with that proviso, I shall continue to write about that general period in our lives, during which a number of things changed for us.

Firstly, poor old Jake. For about the first 18 months of his life he simply refused to sleep, and the only way we could get him to sleep was to pick him up, wrap him in blankets and go and find a bus to ride around in.. That caused him to sleep beautifully – until we returned to his bedroom, put him back in his bed, whereupon he would wake up instantly and start screaming again.

This brought about the only time in Lotty and my relationship when we both considered divorce, with the absolute condition that the other one kept Jake of course!

As you can see, never having more than 2 hours sleep at a time exhausted us......

It was a horrible time, total and continuous exhaustion since we never managed more than a couple of hours sleep ourselves, obviously.

Finally, my mother who always seemed to have a sort of private entry into the world and minds of small children, got fed up with it all, and told us that we had to break what she called Jake's Napoleon Complex by simply refusing to pick him up at night when he indulged in his furious screaming fits,

Easy to say, bloody hard to do, as both of us firmly believed in the idea of picking crying kids up, and not leaving them alone. But she assured us that Jake wasn't actually unhappy, but merely exerting control over us. So we thought “what the hell, anything is worth trying”.

By this time were were living in our Dutch barge, which was 28 meters long, so Jake's bedroom was right up in the bows, and we moved back to the stern of the barge, and did our best to ignore the faint screams we could still hear from Jake.. Miraculously, after a while it actually worked, and he started to sleep the whole night through.... So problem solved. And to the best of my knowledge, he still manages to sleep at night without screaming for several hours before falling asleep...

So that was that problem solved.

As I mentioned, we exchanged Mjojo for a Dutch barge about this time, as it was (we thought) impossible for us to continue our planned world voyage with a kid who needed medical attestation. So we sold Mjojo and borrowed a flat in a small town near Amsterdam called Weesp, and lived there for some months while hunting for a good barge to live on, having decided we liked living on the water.

Waterrat

Apart from my nightly bus rides with Jake, this was a period in which nothing of note happened.

After looking at quite a lot of barges in various conditions from amazing to scrapyard ready, we found the one that would be our home for about 20 years,. She was still being used to carry cargo, but was really too small to be economically viable. She was 28 meters long and registered to carry 120 tons of cargo, which sounds a lot, but most working barges by that time were at least 48 meters long with a capacity of about 450 tons, going up to the big ones who carried several thousand tons of cargo.

But this one seemed a good size for us, she was in good condition, the price (28 000 Guilders) was within our means and we loved her on sight too. She is what is called a Luxe Motor, which means that she had an inboard engine (when she was built in 1928 lots of barges were converted sail barges, and only had motors mounted on the deck as a sort of later addition...) also the Luxe bit referred to the relatively spacious accommodation for her crew that this type of barge had.

A rather nice set of coincidences happened with Waterrat... She cost the original owner 27 000 Guilders to have built in 1928, we paid 28 000 Guilders for her, and some years later the model I made of her for the Ship Museum in Amsterdam cost them 28 000 guilders too... Neat eh?

So in due time we drove down to Zeeland where she was moored, and Lotty headed back to Amsterdam in the car, and the owner and I set off in the barge to sail up to Amsterdam..

Near Rotterdam he got off, and I, all alone, headed onwards to Amsterdam along the river Lek. Remarkably brave or foolish of me, as I had never in my life handled such a vessel, and had to go through several locks before reaching Amsterdam...

About half an hour after the previous owner got off, as I was nervously chugging upstream there was an enormous bang from the engine room, great clouds of smoke poured out of the engine room hatch, and then silence.. No motor, nothing. So with remarkable presence of mind I rushed up to the bows and managed to drop one of the enormous anchors and thus stopped in the middle of the river...

So there I was, feeling rather like someone whose car has broken down in the fast lane of a motorway, no engine, and not a clue about what I should do next.

After some time, a police launch hove into view and came along side and demanded furiously what the hell I though I was doing sitting happily at anchor in the middle of one of the busiest rivers in Europe...

Once the cops got over their surprise at finding an almost non-Dutch speaking Englishman alone on the barge, and I managed to explain what had happened they became extremely friendly, concerned for me, and set about being helpful.

They got a rope onto the barge, and told me to pull the anchor up so they could tow me to a ship yard nearby.... Only problem was I had absolutely no idea about how to pull up that huge (about 500 kilos) anchor... so with a sigh, one of the cops came back on-board, showed me how to raise the anchor and stayed with me to ensure that all went well from then on.. So ingloriously I was towed to a nearby ship yard, the cops departed and I set about discussing replacing the engine.

It turned out that the engine had broken a valve stem, and the broken part of the valve had fallen into the cylinder and broken the con rod, so it punched a huge hole in the side of the engine block... Bye bye engine......

This was a depressing and expensive operation, and took about two weeks to be completed.,. But finally I had a splendid reconditioned huge diesel engine, and taking all our courage in our hands Lotty and I set off to Amsterdam.    Lotty had joined me down there for the trip up to Amsterdam, as it was obviously stupid to try and manage it on my own.... Locks need careful rope and steering work....

That was our introduction to being sort of Bargees... More about life on the water soon...