Moored at buoys in Rotterdam waiting for a berth, above us roaring away is a flare stack. It sounds like a continuous hand dryer except an awful lot louder and maybe more effective but probably not very practical. God only knows what they are burning away, it feels a bit wasteful in this day and age, what with global warming and all the rest, you don’t really want to be wasting heat and fuel. The stack is connected to a large oil refinery of indeterminate ownership, but it’s the Netherlands so no prizes for guessing any of the large Dutch based oil companies of which one are unpopular in Ireland because of Natural gas pipelines.
Anyway waiting at buoys is painful, if we were alongside we could go ashore, but we can only see crumbling jetties and the grass growing on them 150 metres away. We can’t use the rescue boat to go ashore because of the security laws, and the terrorist threat. We can use it close to the ship, but that is like saying you can put on your dancing shoes but no dancing!
Safer to get bored on board.
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