“To one person it’s just like Schiphol, to another a children’s fairy tale…"
“Look, there’s the pilot of the boat!”, I hear a grown woman say as the ferry docks. “He’s also wearing one of those white shirts with stripes on the shoulders, just like at KLM.” The lady is probably enjoying a man in uniform, but normally you would call him the captain or skipper… On that same crossing, a fellow passenger wonders what those big green and red floats in a long row in the sea are doing there. Now I can’t hold back. I explain that they are buoys. That they mark the waterway and that the ferry sails between them, so that we don’t run aground at sea, because it isn’t equally deep everywhere. The man looks at me as if I’ve told him the sea is on fire. We arrive in Nes and the man from before says: “The pont is here”. When I think of a pont, I picture a small boat that helps you cross a river or canal, but this man apparently sees it differently. I can’t resist a quick Google and see that the definition of pont is indeed very broad. A ferry that covers long distances and carries cars can also be called a pont. Learned something new again.
Ebb and flood is another thing that can cause confusion. My father-in-law, Wadden skipper Theo Mosterman, always had a lovely fairy-tale story about the tides on his boat trips, one that I actually wanted to believe myself. He addressed the guests through the microphone and said: “Do you see that the seawater we saw this morning is now almost completely gone? We are now looking at the bottom of the sea. Let me tell you how that happened. When we left this morning, there was a little boy on the jetty selling buckets of seawater. He has evidently done good business, because the sea is almost empty!”
The Wadden, we all experience it in our own way. For many islanders, ebb and flood is in their blood. For some tourists it may be more like a theme park ride or a completely new travel experience full of nautical terms they have no idea about. But what does it matter, call it what you like and enjoy it!
Froukje Mosterman-de Groot, June 2022
