Saturday 22 April We had seen a sign on the “Botterstichting Museum” (Botter foundation museum) that they were having an open day on the 22nd (today, Saturday). So we went along. We had seen some of these lovely old boats before. They are old fishing sailing boats from the early 20th century or even earlier. Two old ladies - Moondance and a Botter The museum was very interesting. We were the first visitors for the day (mostly because we got the time wrong), and a nice man Erik, showed us around and explained the exhibits to us. Elburg used to be right on the sea, the Zuiderzee, but due to dykes and barriers it is now well inland, and now on fresh (sweet) water. Elburg used to be a fishing port with 72 wooden sailing boats that went out onto the Zuiderzee for days at a time, to catch fish and eels. Eeles especially became more important as the sea fish disappeared as the water became fresh. Slowly the fishing business died out and many of the old boats were destroyed or sunk. But a group in Elburg started to restore the boats in the 70s and now the Botter foundation has about 160 volunteers which work on restoring the old boats. Today, as part of the open day they relaunched EB 24, which was the first boat they restored in the 70’s and she had just been restored again. The EB numbers stand for Elburg, and the numbers were for each fisherman license, so there could be more than one boat with the same number. Other town such as Harderwijk have their own letters for boat registered in their town. As well as seeing the launching of the botter, we got to look around the workshops where 2 different boats were being worked on – a very big job. There were trips on the canal in a botter for those that wanted to do that, but us Aussies found it all too cold for a trip in the wind in an open boat.
1 Comment
Ian
26/4/2017 11:40:38 pm
We had a short sail in one in 2014 during one of the festivals and something went wrong with deploying the mainsail. We were videoing it and a lot of passionate Dutch was in the air. Just need someone to translate for us. Sorted out one of the other sails, and all was well.
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AuthorWe are sharing stories about and travels on our barge Moondance. Archives
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