WRITING IS FUN
Ted Polet
1970s SHIPPING NEWS
My ships and voyages
During the 1970s I obtained my Mate's ticket and sailed for Nedlloyd Lines, a Dutch shipping company. In those days Nedlloyd was a big company with at least 100 ships at sea, an amalgamation of the Nederland Line, the Rotterdam Lloyd and the United Dutch Shipping Company (Verenigde Nederlandse Scheepvaartmaatschappij, VNS).
There were a few smaller partner companies, and later even we absorbed the big Royal Interocean Lines company.
These were my ships:
1973 - The trip in the mv Oostkerk
My first voyage in 1973 was bound for the Persian Gulf, which at the time hadn't yet been devastated by a bloody revolution and three wars in succession. We departed from Rotterdam, sailing to Hamburg and London before setting off to South Africa. The Suez Canal had been closed due to war damage since 1968, so we had to circumnavigate all of Africa. Read on...
1976 - Six months in a tramp
Shortly after Christmas 1975 I was sent to relieve the third Mate of the mv Amstelpark, which at that time was in the port of Gdansk in Poland. They had warned me about sailing in a bulkcarrier, so I prepared for a long, boring journey without much chance of seeing anything interesting. In the bottom of my suitcase I packed a hobby box (I still build model trains as a hobby today, 45 years on), which turned out to be a great idea, because boredom almost drove us to our wits' end. Read on...
More sea passages to follow...
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