Is this guy supposed to be a leading example?!

VG Nett

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I have often been asked the question "What do we need the king for?" by people sceptical of the Royal family in a country where they have no meaningful governmental function. I always answer that they are a focal point for the people's sense of unity and nationalism in times of need, and give WW2 as a perfect example of such a case. Also, I add, when somebody is looked up to just because of who they are, they can function as a fantastic vessel for imbuing good attitudes and showing people how to behave properly, just by a leading example. Giving people a good example of their own choosing is often a lot more effective than "motivatonal" campaigns orchestrated by people with scant understanding of PR and little to no understandig of young people's minds.

Of course, this poses the dilemma of what attitudes and practices should be officially sanctioned. Some are obvious choices, such as non-smoking (I'm a sinner!), whereas others, such as monogamy and other religiously motivatded themes, are more open to debate. Here's an easy one for you, though: Safe boating. That ought to be a no-brainer. Here we have a convenient, albeit expensive leading star, in the shape of the crown prince, and he loves to go boating. The very least we could ask of him, then, is that he does everything within his power to set a good example to other boaters. Then, he goes ahead and does this.

For the english speaking readers of this blog (are there any?), here's a short resumé of the above newspaper article. The crown prince goes boating in a high-powered RIB and gets ejected by a wave. At this point, it becomes obvious that he wasn't wearing his kill switch lanyard, as the boat runs in circles for 20 minutes before being brought under control. Then, the bastard gets away from it all without as much as a bruise to show for this exercise in public stupidity.

Luckily, I'm too experienced to be misled by his actions. Given my 100+ hours of driving time in small, fast boats every year, I'm pretty confident that if I don't clip in, I'll be killed for it sooner or later. And as one of my leading examples once put it to me: That's a pretty fucking stupid way to die. Besides, I've spent time in the water thinking I wasn't going to make it, so I don't need anyone to tell me that it's best to make sure the boat stops so you can get back in.

At this point, the RCP has performed pretty much the opposite of what I deem to be one of his most important functions. He has showed young, up-and-coming boaters that you don't need to wear your kill lanyard, because if you have an accident, someone will be there to rescue you. Besides, the royals don't wear it, so why should you? It all makes me wonder how many heavily funded, lightly pondered government motivational campaigns must be fielded to cancel the ill effects caused by our dear Royal Crown Prince on Monday. Haakon, your actions have disappointed me greatly. I don't think your public apology counts for much. After all, that's what you're expected to do when you misbehave, right? Just apologize, and everything is all right. At least, that's what all the young people taking your example are going to think. I hope you read this, and I hope you cringe. But then, who am I to make you cringe? I'm just a nobody, and you're our great leading star. Go shine!

Nimo is gone!

We went into Moss on Friday to watch the new A-team movie. As usual, we let Nimo jump on shore and run around. So far, this hasn't been a problem, as he's always stayed close to the boat. This time, however, he was gone when we returned. We stayed until Sunday, hoping he would come back, but to no avail.

We are both really heartbroken over this. He was very, very dear to us, and life on the Oscilia seems empty without him. We've spent countless hours calling for him, in ever larger circles from the point where he disappeared, and we've put up over thirty posters with his picture, but so far nobody has called. If any of our readers sees him I truly hope they'll leave a comment to this post.

~Henning

Pulled out for repairs

Any of you reading this may have noticed that updates have been thin on the ground lately. I have just ended a construction job that required travelling up north and living on-site, and after completing a 7-19 shift I've simply been too exhausted to produce any meaningful writings. Now that I'm home I'm having to deal with the Oscilia being pulled out for extensive repairs of galvanic corrosion damage. Although this occupies all of my time at the moment, I'll be feeding you lots of updates about the goings on when things quieten down a bit.

I just finished freehanding the propeller blades into a more meaningful shape, and I'll be adding an article on this shortly.

Lessons in safe boat handling

I will never forget the second time I helmed a motor boat larger than twenty-odd feet. The Boss asked me to park a Princess V48 in the crane for a lift-out. The boat being equipped with twin shafts as well as both bow- and stern thrusters, I didn't worry much about the five inches of clearance to the lifting hooks, and approached it in a state of serene calm. This was soon to change.


I fired up the twin Volvos and cast off the mooring lines with the remote rumble throbbing underfoot. The stern line was last to go, and I pushed with my full weight against the pontoon from the swim platform. Slowly, the considerable weight of the boat set into motion, and I strolled up to the helm. There was no detectable trace of current, not a breath of wind to disturb the stern's steady progress away from the pontoon, and everything seemed just right until I pressed the bow thruster control. Nothing at all happened.

Concerned, I gave the stern thruster control a tentative prod to see if I could get back to the pontoon and resolve the issue safely. No such luck. In an instant, the prospect ahead changed dramatically. How would I be able to steer straight between those heavy, sharp, unforgiving lifting hooks and stop the boat without yawing? I couldn't tell as I started the procedure, and the ensuing drama was... well, interesting. Suffice it to say, I caused a massive productivity hit for the neighboring heavy industry as all the workers were standing by the fence, watching The Boss having a near heart attack. Somehow, the Princess came away from it all unscathed, mostly due to my luck.

From this I gleaned a valuable lesson, which came to be my First Golden Rule of safe boat handling: When taking control of a boat you don't know intimately, ALWAYS test all mission critical systems before casting off.


Fast forward three years, and this experience has saved me many times over as I'm taking delivery of my current home, a Steel Lady 43. The day has been one long, mad rush to get all the paperwork in order, sort out all the little niggles, and make her ready for her first voyage in over three years after only a short maneuverability test two days previously. It is darkening, the tidal current is starting to pick up, and in all the stress and commotion my golden rule fades to the glimmering figment of a memory and flutters away in the offshore breeze.


My wife is in the dinghy, motoring slowly out of the harbor as I cast off the mooring lines. Finally, the stress of the day is loosening its grip, easing with the promise of being under way. Getting away from the dock is the easiest maneuver in the book: Stick the transmission in gear, wait for the wind to carry the bow out to a suitable angle, add a couple of inches of propeller pitch, and proceed forward, out the harbor entrance.


Everything goes according to plan until I hit the button to add forward pitch. The expected rumble of tip vortices transmitting themselves through the steel plating of the hull, is completely absent. There is also a conspicuous lack of forward motion. Thinking I must have forgotten one of the myriad of switches, my eyes scan the dashboard for clues. PTO hydraulics look good. The pitch indicator is moving. Gear oil pressure is 5 bar... that's clutch pressure only. My first realization is that the small amount of oil I've spotted in the exhaust wasn't from one of the turbos, after all. My second realization is that I'm in deep trouble. Again, I have one of those perspective changing moments. I am no longer the master of a motorboat cruising through a spacious harbor basin, but the responsible passenger of 22 tons of jagged steel, drifting at an alarming rate towards rows of gleaming, fragile hullsides.


I run outside and look out to sea. My wife has just powered over the dinghy's bow wave, and is moving away at a rate of about twenty knots. Completely forgetting about the gargantuan air horn mounted on the coachroof, I whistle through my teeth, so loud it hurts my own ears. Her head turns a fraction. I whistle again, even louder, and she turns around in her seat to see me jumping up and down, arms flailing. She powers through a 180 degree turn, comes flying through the harbor entrance and drops down with a precision splash right beside me. She then gently nudges the bow of the dinghy up to my hull side, and applies 25 Tohatsu horsepower to push me back to the dock. Her positioning is so perfect that I don't have to move the boat at all in order to slip the springs over the bollards.


This time around I was saved not by my own luck, but by my wife handling the situation so magnificently that you would think she'd spent her whole life as a tug captain (for the record, she is a motorcycle mechanic, and hardly knew what a boat was until she met me). Maybe my pride at this will assist in maintaining my First Golden Rule, so I may never have to learn this again.

Some people have too much luck

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article3690008.ece

I read in today's newspaper that yet another idiot has attempted to kill himself in a boat. Or so it seems. Police say it looks as though he woke up from impacting a rock wall at high speed, and that he was too inebriated to account for the number of people on board. In the end it transpired that he was driving alone, and that no one else was hurt in the accident. While this may not be a conscious attempt at suicide, operating a boat at high speed at night is in and of itself quite dangerous, and should only be done with the highest possible level of vigilance and attention to one's surroundings. If you're near incapacitated from drink, it is obviously impossible to meet these criteria, to such an extent that it must have been apparent to said idiot.

Some of you may wonder why I'm so worked up about this. Citing Darwin, you might argue that this kind of problem is self-correcting, because sooner or later this idiot will run out of luck and smear himself so thorougly on the helm that he doesn't get away with a simple trip to the hospital. As long as he does this alone, he's only endangering himself, right? Sadly, that is not true. I picture myself on one of my nightly excursions, loosely holding the tiller of a 20ft double-ender and enjoying the beauty of the sea in near darkness, the muted chug-chug of an old single cylinder Marna keeping me company. Life is archetypically serene until I spot navigation lights approaching in the distance. "What an asshole," I think to myslef, "coming so close at speed is simly rude!" Then, in a flash, it dawns on me that he's not just rude, he's oblivious. Had I only realized earlier, or if my boat had the power and maneuverability to take effective evasive action, my vision might have had a happier ending. But neither is true, and in the blink of an eye my tranquil serenity goes through panic to blackness. End of story, end of life.

That is, in a nutshell, why I don't think people ought to get away with that sort of thing. Wishing death or debilitating injury upon a fellow human being is a horrible and unempathic line of thinking, but there are three reasons why I fail to see a better ending to this. First, the idiot in this case got remarkably cheaply away from his mistake, and thus it is unlikely that he learned much. Second, if something truly horrifying happened to him, others might learn from his mistake. And third, he's not my fellow human being. He's not my fellow anything. He's simply an idiot with too much luck.

Introducing Nimo

Nimo, whose name is the result of an unfortunate spelling mistake, came to us only six days old. By then he had been handed in to the vet for euthanasia, taken pity upon by the vet's nurse, and brought to the shop where Lisette works as a motorcycle mechanic. When she called to ask if we could take him I was initially sceptical of accepting such a burden in the situation we're in, but I changed my mind once I saw how perfectly he snuggled up in the palm of my hand. Thus, from before he opened his eyes, Nimo has found himself in, on and around boats. As kittens at that age need feeding and all sorts of care four times a day, this involved commuting with Lisette to work in the 10' Trifoil we were using at the time. That might be a harrowing experience to most humans, as we are after all talking about the very same boat that broke my mother-in-law's back in relatively light chop, but Nimo paid no heed. He would simply curl up in the mass of towels inside of his cat carrier and be fast asleep by the time we arrived in Moss.

Ever since he was quite young, Nimo has enjoyed stealing the sardine-sized fish the terns will sometimes drop on deck as they maneuver to swallow them in mid-air. He will lurk on the wheelhouse roof for hours, and pounce before the birds can swoop down to reclaim their catch. It was only two days ago, however, that he had his first experience with larger fish. This may sound strange, as a guy living on a boat must find favorable fishing conditions every now and then, if only by accident. Surely, I cannot be so selfish that I've never given any to the cat? While it is true that I often find myself in the midst of a school of herring boiling to the surface as the mackerel hunt them from below, they have never been presented Nimo for the simple reason that I don't much enjoy fishing. The times we've had friends over who do like to fish, what they've pulled out has always ended up on the barbeque, and mackerel coming Nimo's way has been of the boned and grilled variety. That is how, when my buddies Goffe and Magnus presented him with one they deemed too small for human consumption, Nimo found himself staring at something strangely familiar, yet unknown and threatening. He pawed it for a while, meowed some, then wrapped his face around it and started taking chunks out. Cats always seem to be able to figure out how to get at the tasty bits.

Keeping a cat on a boat has turned out to be way less trouble than people will make you believe. For example, Nimo swims much better than any dog I've seen. Having done so repeatedly albeit unwillingly since only a few weeks old, he doesn't seem to have developed the stereotypical fear of water, either. He'll still balance around on the railings, make impossible-looking jumps from one boat to the other, and every once in a while he'll fail. True to his upbringing, he will spend hours sitting on the swim platform or perched on the edge of the dinghy, attempting to catch surface debris. The only visible sign that he doesn't enjoy the life we've given him, is the extreme agitation he displays when we get close to land. Then, he'll be on whatever part of the boat that's closest to the shore, meowing in a most distinctive manner. When we dock, he jumps long before the deck hand deems it safe, and is gone like speeding bullet, only to return much later.

Another behavioral oddity is his habit with towels. One of his favorite activities when isolated from land is to abscond with a blanket or towel, even quite large ones, and drag it around the boat while howling almost as if in pain. When he feels that his victim has surrendered all resistance, he will rape it thorougly, sometimes for hours on end. Although I have been accused of perverting his innocent mind by putting him in a situation cats aren't meant to endure, I ascribe this more to his isolation from his mother while very young. When he was still a baby, he always wanted to suckle any protruding part of our anatomies, such as ears, noses, fingers, etc. As I've seen this behavior carried through to adult cats and found it not just discomforting but also somewhat painful, we discouraged it, and instead he started suckling any fuzzy object he came across. Over time, this slowly changed into the rape game we see today, and his favorite suckling blanket back then is now his favorite victim. Go figure.

All considered, while Nimo is anything but normal, he's both trusting and affectionate. He regularly crawls into our laps to get his belly scratched, he licks our faces by way of greeting, he follows us around on land like a dog, and he isn't at all apprehensive of cleaning himself while laying in my lap. While neither of these characteristics are unheard of in felines, I take their combined presence as a sign that he both trusts us and enjoys our company. Some people take his presence on our boat as a cue to accuse me of cruelty, shout abuse and make threats, but I'm not so concerned. It's not like he hasn't had plenty of opportunities to run away, but he always comes back. More importantly, I love him to bits, and I think the feeling is mutual. In the face of that, the opinions of strangers mean nought.