Arctic Adventure Part 4 - small German boats, big Dutch boats

The Hamburg Maritime Museum is one of the largest of it's kind in the world.

Oddly enough, although it's now a national museum, it's really the private collection of stuff this guy collected:

Peter Tamm By E. S. Myer - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7694419

I never heard of him either.  Turns out he used to be chairman of the board of Axel Springer SE (which doesn't really clear things up much for an American). Think of him as a German Rupert Murdoch. 
The place is a huge renovated warehouse built in 1878 and contains no less than 10 floors of maritime stuff. Lots of stuff. Some of it boring - he collected 15,000 cruise ship menus (why?). Some quite interesting:

I've seen a fair number of WWII torpedoes in many different museums. But they have all been American torpedoes.  This is the first look I've ever had of one of the nasty bastards that almost won Germany the war. The torpedo is attached to a German mini-sub. The midget subs were developed late in the war as a desperate Nazi attempt to slow down the inevitable invasion of Europe by the Allies.  They didn't work well.  The torpedoes, on the other hand, were almost as good as the Japanese Long Lance torpedo (it wasn't until many many years after the end of the war that the US developed torpedoes that were superior to the Long Lance).

The museum is full of super high quality ship models. But, since I just wrote about Miniature Wonderland (and all their incredible models of everything in the world), I won't bore you with too many ship models. 

Remember, these model ships are one-of-a-kind, hand crafted works of perfection.

Except for a couple that have a personal connection. This is the radio controlled Japanese battleship Yamato that I built. 

It was a faithful reproduction of the largest battleship ever built (18 inch main guns vs. 16 inch US guns). The Yamato was a marvel of Japanese engineering and could have been a terrifying weapon, except for two things. First, it was the pride of the Japanese naval fleet and they never able to bring themselves to risk losing it in an actual ship to ship slug-fest. Second, stupid, pesky airplanes were much better weapons. In 1945 carrier bombers and torpedo planes blew her to bits while she was on a one-way suicide mission to beach herself on the shores of Okinawa.

It was an expensive kit (thousands of parts) with one huge flaw - the instructions were in Japanese. Took me months to build the damn thing and I used it to great effect to terrorize the local ducks in the pond (ducks aren't stupid - they learned to recognize my car and would all exit the water as soon as I drove up). Years later, my son and I blew it up with firecrackers and lighter fluid (boys will be boys).

With that in mind, this is what a professional model of the Yamato looks like.

note the lack of embedded duck feathers on the bow

Not to be content with just a model of what it used to look like, there is even a model submerged in water of what it currently looks like.

Unlike the wreck of the Arizona in Hawaii, the wreck of the Yamato doesn't leak oil.  That's because it never had much.  At the end of the war Japan had run out of fuel.  The Yamato's tanks were fueled by 200 sailors that manually, bucket by bucket, scrapped the bottoms of the oil storage tanks on shore. Quite a few of them died in this dangerous maneuver. 

So the unanswered question is - how good would she have been in a battleship vs. battleship fight?  After all, her main battery had the largest naval guns ever built (18" barrel diameter).

left over 18" shells,  3,200 pounds each (not good for deer hunting)

We'll never know, but there are some tantalizing clues the US Navy was able to determine after the war. The Yamato was very heavily armored.  In places her protective armor was 26" thick. That's a lot of hardened steel.  Good enough to make her impervious to US 16" shell fire? Probably not.  Unused pieces of armor were found in the Japanese Kure ship yard shortly after the war and put to the test back in the gunnery proving ground in Virginia.

This was the result of a pointblank shot.  If it was hit at 26 miles away, no one knows the result. Still probably not good for the watertight integrity of the ship.

The museum has some of the finest miniature metal ship engines you'll see.  See if you can spot what these models of ship engines have in common (hint - it's not just steam):

This is the life's work of an extremely talented machinist

These model steam engines all WORK!

This is a diesel engine model - note, except for the smell it's an accurate replication, but it doesn't run

When you get tired of all the regular model ships and want to see something more expensive, try some of these:

 

Solid silver

Still want something more expensive?

Gold

It gets worse.

Ivory

Some of the stuff in the museum is quite gruesome and hard to look at:

I hate to say it, but you will be seeing more of these whale harpoons in a later blog.

This is a lighthouse ship (real).

Here's a model

Since the advent of reliable LORAN, and now GPS, no real need exists for these venerable icons.  Because they're so inherently cool, when they are taken out of service no one wants to scrap them.  You can see lots of derelict lighthouse ships in ports all over Europe waiting to be rescued by a dedicated preservation society.

I've always wondered what light source they used before switching to electric bulbs.

The white mantle contains Thorium dioxide, which glows brightly, however, it's slightly radioactive.

In any of the pirate movies you always see at least one of these things.

18th century paparazzi 

As a side note, I'd like to pass on a personal recommendation. Ditch your old binoculars and buy a pair of these.

 These stabilized binoculars use the same technology that Canon uses to stabilize it's telephoto lenses. Man, what a difference.

From Hamburg we took the train to Amsterdam.

300 km/hr  =  186 mph

But it wasn't that one. That's one of Germany's high speed trains. We got stuck on a "slow" one.  When I asked the conductor how fast we were going (because trying to watch the scenery going by was making my eyes ache) he apologized that we were only going 210 km/hr (130 mph).

Amsterdam

I thought that Amsterdam would be full of canals stuffed with low boats - I was right!  It is! The place is gorgeous. The 60 miles of canals date back to the 17th century.

Live-aboard canal boats line both sides of almost every single waterway. It's spectacular, to say the least:

As with every neighborhood, you have the occasional junk collector

Some of the boats have things that stand out.

Loved it

Some make you wonder

Rain gutters? On a house boat?

Poe's old pet?

WTF?

As you would expect with so many canals, there are lots of bridges (1,200).  They're pretty cool - old or new.

Old

New

The canals are about 10 feet deep with murky brown water. 

You can actually safely swim in these canals (this is Holland, not Asia).  In fact, every year the royal family goes for a widely publicized canal swim.  There is a modern reason the water is clean, and an old reason.  First the modern reason:

Every boat, without exception, is required to be hooked up to the sewer. In the old days, there was an intricate solution of canal locks that would divert water through the canals using the tides. A giant flush, if you will.  This is no longer done, however, the canals still retain the old lock doors in case of storm surge.

The canals occasionally freeze in the winter (no idea what the boat owners do). The last time was 2013.

This is the same bridge you saw above (stole this pic from  the web)

Dutch civil engineers are world famous.  No surprise, they get lots of experience. Amsterdam is somewhat like Venice - it's not situated on bedrock (like NYC). Over the years, the buildings start to lean.

This isn't an optical illusion, the buildings really are leaning

The building on the left is leaning forward (or the building on the right is leaning back)

One of the things that makes Amsterdam so delightful is the abundance of bikes (in a 2015 census there were more bikes than people - some 1,200,000 bikes).

They're everywhere and the streets are specifically designed with bikes in mind.  The bike paths aren't just white lines painted on the asphalt.  Many are rubber compound paths:

As a pedestrian you need to pay attention and stay vigilant. Bikes have the right of way (as best I could tell)

No visit to Amsterdam would be complete without at least seeing the outside of this place

The line to get in stretches around the corner and is normally a 3 hour wait. Not happening, nor will I ever visit a concentration camp. I admire many things about the German military (yes I know this is Holland) but I draw the line at Nazi atrocity attractions.

Holland is known for it's "live and let live" attitude.

Bongeria

So stoned they can't move.  I watched the guy with the cigarette - I'm pretty sure he was wondering intently what planet he was on.

I believe that in the earlier days of pot in Amsterdam you could only smoke inside one of the coffee shops.  Now there are pot only shops (unlike in the US - you can smoke in the Amsterdam shops) As far as I could tell, you can smoke weed where ever you want. Lots of Amsterdam streets smell like college campuses. 

Random humor:

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If you're waiting for pictures from the Red Light District, you're going to be disappointed.  I didn't get the chance to go.  I'm not a night person and the thought of going to the Red Light District during the day (with a camera) was a bit creepy. 

The actual port for Amsterdam is 24 miles away from downtown. It's the 3rd largest port in Europe and is quite busy.  If you look past all the shipping stuff you can see some interesting things that have been largely obscured by time.

The Germans defeated Holland early on in the war (1940). This gave them plenty of time to build massive defense bunkers. I believe all the weaponry has been removed, but the thick concrete bunkers will be around for a long, long time. These bunkers I photographed from the ship as we were leaving.   The woman to my left noticed my interest in the fortifications. As it turns out, she grew up in those bunkers as a small German child. Her father was in the Wehrmacht stationed here (he was killed later in the war). She said the lines of bunkers go on for mile after mile. Most are obscured by the sand dunes. 

From here we head out into the wicked North Sea.