27 March 2021 - 30 years in shipping

Today 30 years ago I started my shipping career.

In the years before Shipping, with only a high school diploma in my pocket, I worked as a furniture delivery-guy for a large furniture store near Rotterdam. For four years I would get up at 6 in the morning only to come home sometimes at 9, 10 or even later at night. Delivering furniture to people's homes in rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, cold, hot. It was a very physically challenging job which I actually quite enjoyed. I would never again work physically as hard as those four years on that truck. One fateful day however, I pulled a muscle in my back lifting a mattress made of air and the bugger wouldn't heal.

That pulled muscle changed my life as I had to find an office job.

Starting in 1991 as an operational clerk entering data into a computer for a liner service named BG Freightline, within 2 years changed to a position as shipbroker at a small towage company in Rotterdam named Jan Kooren. I loved this job! Quickly there we saw turnover for shipbroking exceed the turnover of the towage division which was strange because there was 2,5 people in shipbroking and 40 in the towage division. Ineke Oskam was the local spelling-nazi and she taught me how to structure English business letters and would sometimes (almost) hit me if I made a spelling mistake. I am very thankful for her hard lessons. Piet Breeuwer was my boss and I hated him BUT he taught me all the tricks, ethics, negotiation skills and psychology needed to succeed later on. Only later would I realise how ridiculously high the level was we achieved as such a small team in those early 90ies. At one stage somewhere around 1995, we brokered the sale of the "Pacific Link" for KDD a division of NTT, the Japanese Telecommunication company, then the largest corporation in the world. During the last inspection, the CEO of NTT attended, so I spent a few days in the Station Hotel in Aberdeen with the CEO of the largest corporation in the world selling a $ 25 million vessel. Drunken Norwegian Vikings during dinner with the CEO of the largest corporation in the world. Those were the days.

I left Jan Kooren after 4 years or so because they wouldn't raise my salary with 25 Guilders per month after four years. They were later bought by Smit International whom were then bought by Boskalis. After a short period at Dirk Kwantes' LKL Oceantrade as a family we decided to emigrate to Australia in 1999 where I had managed to get a position at Asiaworld Shipping to set up a new SNP department. Dirk was not happy and I still feel a little burdened having to leave such a great guy. Would I have stayed in Holland I doubt I would ever have left LKL. On 1 January 2000 I became agent for Damen Shipyards in Australia and New Zealand where I became known as the "Flying Dutchman" for being in a plane almost daily visiting clients, starting and leading the largest shipbroking firm in Asia Pacific from the year 2000. During this period I was also General Manager in a JV which had the Hon Bob Hawke (ex-Prime Minister of Australia) as Chairman of our JV partner and my meetings together with Bob (he let me call him Bob) at various government agencies in Queensland were legendary. I don't impress quickly but Bob was awesome and extremely funny. We won a 19 year Government contract but were unable to raise the funds mainly due to a suspicion that the Global Financial markets were about to crash...

Damen, one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world, had never sold a ship to Australia or New Zealand. In 2008 when I left, we were at yard number 34 and had sold harbour tugs to almost every state in Australia and New Zealand. ADSTEAM, Svitzer, Rio Tinto with the legendary Chad Blewitt, Dampier Salt, Dalrymple Bay, Chris Stannard and many more became happy Damen clients. With my best friend Pim Schuurman we travelled through Australia and NZ so often that some clients complained they saw us more than their wives. To this day AIS is still agents for Damen. I must thank here René and Sys Stuckert to introduce me and especially Ken Fitzpatrick for giving me a chance in Australia. I know at times he could drink my blood but hope that by now he can still spare a smile at this stubborn Dutchie. They were 9 extreme intense years which I never would have wanted to miss. Most important was that I could offer my boys an upbringing and quality of life that would have been impossible to offer in Holland.

Unfortunately for the entire Australian period I struggled with mental and physical problems which at times were exacerbated by the enormous pressure I put on myself to succeed. It resulted in tensions with some of my colleagues for which they were not to blame. It was one of the main drivers for me to move back to Europe. We started in the Cote D'Azure in France. To make things "extra fun" the day we landed somewhere August 2008, Lehman Brothers in the USA went bankrupt and the GFC started. It was without a doubt the worst period to start a new company in the most expensive region in the world and understandably Asiaworld pulled out so I was on my own, for the first time in my professional career on my own two feet. In a country whose language I barely spoke, in a global Oil&Gas market which had more or less died. On the upside within weeks from arrival in France, the often severe physical and mental problems I had been suffering from in Australia for years miraculously disappeared to never return. I have no explanation for this.

Then early in 2010 we were invited through KPMG to live in Monaco under circumstances which still mystify us to this day because we were not even close to fulfilling the financial requirements to live there, let alone get a bank account. However, even the Mayor of Cannes made a morning free to introduce me to the banks and facilitators in Monaco and I had never met the man before! The rumour is that in 2008 (the now) Princess Charlene made it a condition to make the Principality a more family-friendly place for her to live and start a family in Monaco. Therefore international families from the Cote D'Azure were screened and approached to live in Monaco. If you compare the Monaco of 2010 with the Monaco of 2021, you can see that Princess Charlene clearly succeeded. The vetting process was extremely difficult and quite expensive but on 1 November 2010 we definitely settled in Monaco and both my Boys would go to the International School of Monaco. I have no idea if indeed Princess Charlene is responsible for our move to Monaco but if so: Dankjewel!

We established Romas Marine Monaco (SARL) which next week on the 1st of April is exactly 10 years ago. In these 10 years we have seen many successes and many more failures. Working hard, staying honest, staying close to our principles and re-inventing ourselves when necessary were the main reason that we were able to weather the storms of the last 10 years where many of the friends we had pre-2008 and 2014 did not. Having gone through the GFC and the ridiculous drop in oil price in 2014 which started a 5- year dull in our sector only to be hit by Covid19, we are still alive; like cockroaches, the nickname of people from Rotterdam. I am sure we will also weather this storm.

Who knows what's in store next? Maybe the world will find out that the Renewables sector is a bubble worse than the housing market in the USA in 2007 or that we need higher levels of CO2 to survive as a species not less. Maybe we will find out that the Great Barrier Reef is not at all dying but thriving in higher water temperatures with higher CO2 levels which would make sense considering it's 570 million years old and other reefs in higher water temperatures have more bio-diversity, not less.. Maybe we will find out that burning the fossil fuels in oil means we actually save the world and not kill it because if the CO2 level in the atmosphere drops under 150 ppm, plants cannot survive and before 1980 we were at a dangerous 180 ppm to now 400 ppm. After all higher temperatures mean more biodiversity, not less. Maybe after 10 really challenging years, we now enter a new oil-boom similar to the minerals boom 20 years ago? Will we see the roaring 20ies? Maybe I will leave shipping altogether to focus om my passion of quantum physics and especially quantum consciousness? Who knows.

I can't wait to find out what crazy new adventures lie ahead of us.