A First Trip Out

After a few short practice trips I started to get the hang of maneuvering the boat. Surrounding it with buoys, and going very slowly, made the experience hardly at all scary, so on a sunny day I took off on a longer journey, travelling down Herengracht and confidently turning the corner into Leidsegracht.

On the West side of Amsterdam there are four part parallel, part concentric, canals; Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengract. Leidsegracht runs across the latter three of these at the start of what is called the ‘Golden Bend’, as it was the area where the richest merchants lived, and thus has some of the grandest architecture.

On a sunny day in Amsterdam (something only marginally, though nevertheless significantly, more likely than one in Manchester) the main canals are patrolled by a massive fleet of huge scary creatures called tourist boats. These things have six separate drives and can turn on a euro cent (or maybe it should be a five euro cent, since single cents have long been a thing of legend). They are built exactly large enough to get all through the central bridges on the various sightseeing routes with about 0.0001 mm to spare. Leidsegracht is a key connecting canal in these routes, as I discovered when presented with the long port side of one of the aforementioned tourists boats as I timidly emerged into the Keizersgracht junction.

My motor has three gear positions. Forward, neutral and a third that is jokingly called ‘reverse’. I say this because on the whole boats really aren’t good at reverse, If they have two pointed ends like a canoe maybe – but then you are unlikely to be powering the thing with an outboard motor clamped to one end. Reverse gear is really used as a brake – or to back up very, very slowly. Confronted with the juggernaut my natural reaction was to throw the thing into reverse and up the throttle. I was about to learn about a small defect with this motor. When in the vertical operational position it didn’t actually lock. This is fine when moving forward as the backward force created by the propeller pushes the shaft against the back of the boat. When the motor is put into reverse, however, the opposite effect occurs.

As the shaft of the motor rose out of the water, accompanied by the deafening scream of a propeller freed from its watery muffler, I became the centerpiece of one of the more amusing scenes in about 200 photo and video sets that would bore Japanese neighbours for years to come.