Who needs freeboard?

[westernman]

 

[Stemar]

Elfin safety? Never 'erd of it!

I wonder how many overloaded barges like that sink?

 

[johnalison]

It looks a bit like St Valery en Caux when the gate opens. I loved the way he took such care to deploy his token fenders.

Dutch barges often have little more freeboard, making them hard to spot for inattentive sailors, not that I would know, of course.

i see that the channel is Nguyen something or other. I recently watched a charming Vietnamese girl on YouTube explaining how to pronounce Vietnamese surnames, though I forget how to say Nguyen. Apparently it is very important to get the pronunciation right. Her own name Vu if wrongly spoken turns out to mean nipple.

 

[LittleSister]

'It's good practice to run one's engine at full power from time to time to avoid polishing of the bores.'

I saw some of those vids some time ago, and a higher proportion of the barge passages through the dam were marginal or unsuccessful, sometimes with collisions or near collisions with boats waiting behind them when they dropped back for another try. I think also all these boats were steel, but I seem to recall some of them being wooden and looking rather fragile for the loads and tasks.

 

[mjcoon]

...
i see that the channel is Nguyen something or other. I recently watched a charming Vietnamese girl on YouTube explaining how to pronounce Vietnamese surnames, though I forget how to say Nguyen. Apparently it is very important to get the pronunciation right. Her own name Vu if wrongly spoken turns out to mean nipple.

Must make machine translation tricky. Hydraulic ram = water sheep is a minor glitch by comparison...