Teachers` Outing
She was hopeless at reading maps. Utterly hopeless. Maybe that was one of the reasons why her husband divorced her. He just couldn’t stand her looking at a map upside down figuring out where they were. He started to yell, she started to cry. Same procedure every year.
But she was not completely stupid. As a matter of fact she was pretty good at organizing things. For example, the yearly outing of her colleagues at school. The other teachers liked her ideas. And when she proposed at the end of the summer term to hire a fishing boat to take them to the seals banks in the North Sea, they enthusiastically accepted. The school being only an
hour’s drive away from Fedderwardersiel, a small fishing village where the boat would set off at 10 o‘ clock in the morning.
As the trip would take six to seven hours and no food would be served on board she ordered a catering firm to prepare platters with meatballs, sausages, fish and various salads to feed eighty hungry people.
As the big camping car had remained in her possession after the divorce – her husband kept the Mercedes – she even agreed to pick up the food herself and take it to the boat.
It was not the time of the navigator yet, but an hour’s drive should be no problem, not even for her. A colleague had shown her the route on the map the day before – she had nodded. She put the map on the empty passenger seat beside her, made sure that the village of Fedderwarden was situated west of Wilhelmshaven, and with the car smelling nicely of fish and meat she started off.
After an hour’s drive she started to get nervous. She couldn`t catch a glimpse of the North sea. Even Wilhelmshaven was not in sight. She stopped the car, glanced at the map again and wondered, why Fedderwarden wasn’t situated on the water, but kind of inlandish. As the tank was nearly empty, she stopped at the gas station and asked the man behind the counter where she could find her fisherboat in Fedderwarden.. „Oh“, he said.“ You can‘ find a single boat in Fedderwarden. You probably mean the village of Fedderwardersiel . Siel meaning „small water“ – you know.“ She didn’t know that. She wasn’t raised at the coast. „It is on the other side of the bay. You have to turn . It is only an hour’s drive from here.“
She was desperate. With nobody having a cell phone then – at that time – she drove as fast as she could. The captain had warned her that because of the change of tide the boat couldn’t endlessly wait for its passengers to embark but had to leave for the open sea at 10.30 the latest. With low tide the ship would get stuck in the mud.
When she reached Fedderwardersiel she saw the boat already dancing on the waves facing the open sea. She watched her colleagues raising their arms, waving and shouting. But there was no way to get the food on board. It started to rain, and the wind grew stronger with the waves getting higher and higher. She waited patiently for many hours in pouring rain, parking the car near the habour. She declined all offers from tourists who glanced into her van and wanted her to sell the delicious looking food to them.
Tthe boat came finally back after 7 1/2 hours on open waters, and she expected the worst. But before she could murmer an excuse, she was embraced by the first teacher who had jumped from board.. »Thank God, you are her. You know, we were all so seasick we wouldn‘t have stood the sight of food.. But now in calm waters we are nearly starved. » And he started to pull the platters out of the van and handed them over to his colleagues who had built a chain to get the food on board as fast as possible. When the platters reached the ship they were nearly empty.
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