Page 9: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (December 2024)

Just the thought of living on a boat like that with your parents and siblings, arriving at a Rhine port, taking the car off the deck, drive around town, put it back on the barge again and go to the next port. It seemed so excit- ing and weirdly powerful.

That to me seemed like the best way to live.

Always moving around on a boat and never having to go to school! Unfortunately, my mother quickly dis- avowed me of that notion and told me there was a board- ing school for skipper’s kids in Rotterdam, which did not seem as much fun.

Some 60 years later I was in Holland at a party and discovered I was sitting next to a couple that had just sold their Rhine barge, and had retired to a pleasure cruising boat.

That ? ipped me back to my youth and right away I asked: “Did you have a car on deck?”

They looked at me kind of strangely and said: “Yes, why not?”

I explained my 1960’s fascination. The husband then ? red up his phone and showed me all the Rhine barges his family had owned going back to the 1940’s and the ? rst one with a car was in the 1960’s. I then asked the husband if he went to skipper kids’ school and his acknowledge- ment made it clear I was sitting next to an expert, and

I quizzed him about the growth in sizes of the barges, the trades they had been in, and the propulsion engines they preferred. He and his wife also added that on their most recent vessels the accommodations had been very spacious and because they ran low speed diesels, the ac- commodations were very comfortable too. He also told me he sort of liked the skipper kids’ school, but then the conversation shifted, and I did not get to dig any deeper.

When I got back to the US, I wondered what the pres- ent status of those schools was. With ubiquitous inter- net, the ability to homeschool kids aboard surely would reduce the need for these boarding schools. It turns out there is a switch. The boarding schools are closing, and there is a certain level of internet instruction, but it is progressing only slowly.

Worldwide we are experiencing crew shortages and there even is a push for autonomous shipping; ships with- out humans aboard. But are we actually engaging the prob- lem in the right way?

Autonomous long-haul shipping has some weird unex- amined economic issues. The ? rst relating to the fact that a ship that does not move makes no money. All those repairs and ? xes that get made by the crew when the ship is mov- ing, will now require that the ship be laid up somewhere.

And when things truly go wrong, it will certainly not be

MR #12 (1-17).indd 9 12/5/2024 11:37:15 AM