Page 21 - Willem Barentsz

does good to get the best suit for the day and have dinner in a good restaurant in the evening.
Afterwards a cinema and to Café du Theatre. There you will be served by the Swiss couple who run
the business and, until well after closing time, you will enjoy their cooking, a delicious glass of wine
and a good piece of music. Civilization also has its advantages. In Cape Town it was a busy few days,
but there was always enough time to buy a present for home. At the table it is also noticeable that
you are lying alongside. Fresh milk, fresh fruit and delicious lobster salad. The remaining journey
home is already a kind of holiday. For the radio crew, one man stayed behind in Cape Town for the
benefit of the catchers fleet. Three men on watch, four on, eight off and two men on the day shift.
Inventory, repair lists and requisitions. The ship is also getting cleaner by the day, everywhere is being
cleaned and painted. The deck speakers were destroyed every year in the cleaning frenzy. They were
not designed for a jet of warm seawater in the horn.

In The Channel, the debilitating disease "Channel Fever" is starting to emerge in everyone, or to
speak with one of our mates: "The pyjama-free era is about to dawn". In the Norwegian Sandefjord,
the midwives were always extremely busy around February, they said. I can imagine it. A day before
arrival, we always asked PCH for a separate telephony channel. Apparently, that had quite a few
snags. You didn't get a good telephony frequency, and The Channel is not such a favourable place for
telephony anyway. Of course, everyone wanted to make a phone call to arrange the pick-up service.
That was still a peak for the radio service. The already thick coffers of about 30,000 guilders were
replenished. Fortunately, all settlements went through the office, and we had no problems with cash
payment.

With the new ship we always went to Vlaardingen first to unload oil at the Nieuwe Matex. However,
with explosives on board, we were not allowed to enter the Nieuwe Waterweg. I remember that we
would once put into the Waterweg early in the morning with a thick breeze. The "Buffel" of Smit-Tak
would come alongside to take over the explosives, but did not want to take the risk. Fortunately, I was
able to call my wife. After hours of delay, the "Buffel" decided, after a lot of back and forth, to come
alongside. Out of pure anger, the cans of powder were thrown extra hard, so that the crew of the
"Buffel" was thin through their pants. At Hook of Holland, the man also came on board with his
suitcase with thousand-guilder notes, followed by the man with hand in his pocket at the piece.
Everyone went home with a safety pin on the inside pocket. Suddenly, a closed community falls apart
and once it is the last. What remains is the memory, in which the good things, such as camaraderie,
are fortunately best preserved.
Decline in whale stocks.

The decline of the whaling population was already beginning to take shape. The blue whale was
already becoming rare and the time when the horizon was full of the spouts of groups of hundreds of
"fin whales", who were scurrying at breakneck speed from one feeding area to another, was coming
to an end. It became more and more "Few and far between". Nevertheless, we still experienced a few
reasonably good years, and the company remained in the black figures for a few more years. The
catcher’s file was still being restructured. Three new catchers, built entirely in the Netherlands, were
added to the fleet. A partnership was also entered into with a Japanese company, so that a Japanese
freezer ship took over more than 7,000 tons of meat from us every year. Great attention was paid to
productivity (boiling). In the season 1962-1963 the boil out was 137.5 barrels of oil per B.W.U., which
meant a good result. But already in the 1961-1962 season the oil price was only 466 guilders per ton.
More and more vegetable fats and large quantities of fish oil from Peru became available. The
necessity, with which everything had begun, to practice whaling for the purpose of food supply was
over and it was no longer economically attractive, at least in the Netherlands.