Remarks

…People on shore usually have no idea what goes on on a ship, and then you get the strangest questions.
You have to keep a straight face and take the comments seriously.
We sail on a ship; we never worked on it.
‘How do you get power on board’ or ‘do you also sail at night’?

Stupid questions get stupid answers.
‘We brought long extension cords for the electricity, and we have to plug them into the sockets along the way,’ and ‘Of course we don’t sail at night; we have to sleep too, after all.’
You see them nodding understandingly, while inside you burst out laughing.

We came here regularly.

When we went to load water at the Newlyn pier, it was straight into that pub.

I was sitting in an English pub with radio operator Henk Klaver.
Henk had a belt with a buckle that looked like Chinese characters.
One of the ladies present asked him what that meant.
‘Well,’ Henk began thoughtfully, ‘that is a medal of honor that I earned with courage in the Dutch-Chinese War.’
They had never heard of it, nor had we, but they believed him.

We had a fun evening with these women afterward.
The beer tasted pretty good, and we twirled across the dance floor with them.
That is where I made a blunder, though.

At midnight, the music started playing again, and I grabbed my dance partner tightly once more.
However, she stood stock-still and corrected me: the band was playing the English national anthem.