Flat-bottomed girl Views from the canal VALERIE POORE takes the helm of our regular barge boat column.
The flat-bottomed girl moves on As regular readers here will know, for the last twenty years I’ve been a resident of a unique outdoor museum: the Oude Haven, Rotterdam’s oldest harbour. As one of the city’s main tourist spots, it attracts visitors from all over the world, so you could say that all the barges are exhibits with their owners as individual curators. It’s been a wonderful place to be based and I’ve loved living there amongst its very special community of likeminded enthusiasts. However, staying in one place was not my intention when I bought my barge, Vereeniging. My idea was to restore her and then travel, preferably to France. But somehow, I got stuck; the lure of the historic craft and my affection for the harbour community were forces to be reckoned with. It was only earlier this year that I realised with a shock how long I’d been in the Oude Haven and that I’d barely been anywhere on Vereeniging in the last few years other than one or two local trips. That’s not to say my partner and I haven’t travelled; we have, but
we’ve done nearly all of our cruising (or ‘faring’, as I call it) on our holiday boat, Hennie H, and my poor, beautiful Vereeniging has remained sandwiched between the other monuments in Rotterdam; not unloved, but certainly unmoved. It was time for a change; time to uproot ourselves from our comfort zone.
I started looking around to see where else I could take my barge that would be a base for more canal cruising and exploration. One of the problems of being in the Oude Haven has been the difficulty of simply leaving and arriving. Not only are there the tides to consider, but the way the moorings are arranged means there are no individual bollards or rings. We’ve always had to share them with neighbours, the result being that lines and cables become tangled and it’s been a real task to extract ourselves from our berth. We’ve often thought of taking a trip but have all too frequently been deterred by the effort it would involve. So, my aim was to find a mooring where it would be much easier to cast off and get going. SisterShip 54
