NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
May 25, 2005
Zimbabwefication
Darn! ... The Shah of Iran's old Blohm & Voss yacht was on the market, and I missed it. It was going for just 6.5 million euros (and wasn't I just looking for something under 10). It's a nice 300-foot ship (45-ft. abeam), with 100 en-suite staterooms, on six decks. Good disco-dancing facilities, multiple bars, skeet shooting, beauty salon, helicopter pad, the works. (Guess you'd have to buy the ’bird separately; I hear President Bush’s Sikorsky will soon be retired.) The boat needs a bit of refitting, but hey: you can't get one new like this for less than 50 million.(Was thinking, gather up my friends, and let's leave Canada in style.) There's still a 1961 B&V passenger ship on the market -- indeed, a little longer and a little wider. A snip at just over 2 million euros. But I’ve seen the advertisement at Yachtmarket.com, and from the price, it’s likely to be a real fixer-upper. Also, a bit of a troopship, at 1800 berths. And no royal cashay. I admit a partiality to this shipbuilder’s works. They’ve been boatbuilding in Hamburg since Germany had an emperor, and making some pretty spiffy yachts since the late 1920s. The Imperator, and the Vaterland, both came from their yard. And please, don’t hit me with the Nazi associations, it was the Kaiser who launched both those ships. The idea of a refit appeals to me. When I was a kid, washing dishes at a four-and-a-half star hotel in Eilat, Israel, together with two recently retired Royal Marines, and a freshly graduated Cambridge astronomer, we hatched a scheme to purchase a North Sea trawler. The idea was to have her done up as a research vessel. With a bit of hull reinforcement we might take to the south seas. By “south seas” we meant the Antarctic. The ambition was to go skiing with the belly-flopping penguins on South Georgia, then establish if anyone was at home on the Kerguelen Islands. The astronomer wanted a good look at the southern constellations, and I was curious about leopard seals. Finally we’d sail to Singapore, where one of the Marines had once spotted a pretty girl while on shore leave. The plan came to pieces owing to lack of money. We had between us about four times one dishwasher’s salary, which even at triple-shift, and kipping on the beach, does not amount to much after a week or two. Later, I recall other company, and a scheme for acquiring a bigger boat. It would have to be large enough not only to land a couple of helicopters, but for the hangars in which to conceal them. Also for accommodating large numbers of people, though with modest service expectations. Those were the days of the Vietnamese boat people, and terror in the form of pirates, rampant in the South China Sea. My friend was ex-U.S. Navy, had served with distinction in Vietnam. (No, he was not John Kerry.) He wanted to do something for the refugees. We would christen this ship the “Do Good”, after the noise made by the Vietnam-era Hueys, with their thick metal rotors: “do-good-ah-do-good-ah”. This boat was intended as a rescue platform, but also as something else. The helicopters my friend had in mind would be a Huey Cobra, and a little Loach scout. They would form what is called a “Pink Team”, but adapting that land operation to the life at sea. The unarmed Loach would go buzz any strange, unidentified watercraft, leading sea-strewn refugees to safety if it happened to contain them; or drawing the inevitable small-arms fire if it happened to be pirates. The Loach is a cute, glass-bubble, manoeuvrable thing, that can take surprising amounts of stray fire without stalling. Having spotted wicked pirates, and marked them with pink flares, the Cobra would then swoop in with rockets and blow them out of the water. Pirate ships tend not to be registered, and the pirates themselves to be of no fixed address. No one notices when one goes to the bottom. Now, this is not what most motor-yachtsmen dream of. They are, I should think invariably, filthy stinking rich; and most merely looking for a good time. Glancing through the gossipy notes with Diane Byrne’s most recent listing of the world’s 100 largest pleasure craft in Power & Motoryacht, or reading the publicity for this year’s Yacht Show at Port Hercules, one forms the distinct impression that these Arab oil sheiks, Russian billionaires, &c, err on the side of decadence. The names of the yachts alone suggest big money and little imagination. They are not classy, like the Yankee industrialists of old. I have another scheme to refit one of Paul Martin’s Great Lakes sausage freighters for a Magellanic world cruise. I figure, in return for not writing about the Zimbabwefication of Canadian politics, he might consider giving me one. I give him until Saturday. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top