Diver Valentin describes his experience with a ship "Ernestini", which ran aground in Kolka a century ago, and his experience with the local "Pirates from Kolčenia".
Table of Contents
A steamship - a sailing ship sunk in Cape Kolka
In order to be able to help me "from above", the boat is anchoredif above deck between the two masts. The hatches had covers in the storm torn off, and now two large quadrilaterals loomed on the ship's deckni voids.
I got out of the boat directly on the deck without the helmet that my father put onpoked me in the head when I was standing up to my waist in water. It's quite uncomfortable to splash under water if it's not enough deep. Father made me measure the big holes in length, in width, thickness and corner to corner. I measured orprimarily with different techniques. Father, in comparison measurements, found them to agree with each other. OK good! To go down to look if there are any holes or other damage.
A diver examines the premises of a sunken ship in Kolkata
I went "down" and walked around the darkened room alone end to end. I didn't find any holes. At both ends strong iron partitions, iron beams along the sides and aug an iron ceiling above his head, all made of iron. Underfoot sand-covered empty bags. The salt cargo is dissolved in the water. It was also necessary to look at the engine compartment. The entrance to them is from the roomres houses. I got down, but I couldn't turn around. For me the rooms were too narrow for the dress. I groped for the diesel in the dark and for some smaller motors, the steering wheel crawls back in the house.
The door to the captain's cabin is open. Wanted to stick degunu there too. A faint, ghostly light streamed through the chfor the round boxes. Why four? From outside saw only two. The room seemed disproportionately long with duron the opposite wall. And something moved in the door! Such izthe flood was smooth. I walked further and the deer came towards me. Bothsoon as a diver.
Where could such a thing happen here?! I took another step and bumped into the mirror! I had seen myself in the mirror: a ragged, bloated body, a leaden heart on my chest and a bright caper's head with four glass eyes. Such
the freak could scare even the biggest seal, not just myself! In the mirror, I also saw freaky images of the couch and the desk behind me. A beautiful cabin for a 200 ton boat!
Did the captain need a mirror that big to see all the buttons on the uniform and the stitching on the cuffs? Beards
much less was enough for tasting. The father pulled the signal rope to pour water in the field. Ziemelis was already running along the sea and churning the water above Ernestine.
Father did not ask at all what I had seen. levi pulled me into the boat, pushed it away from the wreck and - we set sail with the wind of the road
for breakfast. When we got to the shore, little lambs were already dancing around Ernestine.
Sailors called Cape Kolka Domesnas
Only by chance was Bērzkalns lucky enough to be in Kolka, when a storm overturned Ernestini and the lighthouse keeper
fished out of the waves in a boat and brought to the shore around the ship's servant. Bērzkalns invited the ship's captain to dry and warm himself. He trembled so much because of anger, lamentation or cold that he could only say: "Verfluchte Domesnas” (Sailors called Cape Kolka Domesnass).
The captain bought the ship cheaply, because it had suffered a bit in a collision with a bigger ship, christened it Ernestine after his bride, put in a new engine and repaired it so that next time he could go on a honeymoon trip, spend his life on it with his family and leave it again to his son. This time, by chartering the Ernestini with a cargo of salt to Arensburg, he hoped to earn money for the wedding. But now? "Verfluchtes Domesnas!”
Old fishermen of Kolka
The new guests were old fishermen, whose bone pain or boards no longer allowed them to go to the sea to fish for smelt. turning around - as they passed by - to, wishing all the best, dissuade Bērzkalnu from the foolish idea of raising the ship. Ernestine will never swim again, because no ship has yet been excavated from the sands of Kolka. The many sailors buried on the shoal were listed... Although the old people spoke half Latvian, half Libyan, I learned that in the winter when they built the lighthouse at the end of the shoal, the sea froze so much that they could carry the stones with horses across the Irve Strait from Sami Island.
Kolka pirates - leg spinners
Gossip about leg cutters is a cold lie. What sane person would set fire to a horse's head and tail and lead it on a sedum on a stormy night to entice the sailors to run willfully over the shoal? And who will cut off the feet of a living or dead person to get to the boots? How are you going to get a severed leg out of a boot?! As if the good things that the sea itself threw ashore were not enough. Until recently, when they broke the old Asara ferry, the planks alone could not pick up the leeward... The old man looked at his father and, realizing that he had come close to a dangerous shoal, he swam back to the safer waters of the past...
100 years ago, the Gulf of Riga was called Mazjūra
Ernestine's masts were visible in the middle of the shoal already halfway to the lighthouse. To the left is the Irve Strait and the Baltic Sea, which the locals called Dižuur, to the right is the Gulf of Riga - Mazjūra. On the shore, the currents and waves of the two seas met and fought, the side that was helped by the wind winning. But - no matter what winds blow, they all blow from the sea". However, the ``land'' winds from the southwest were even worse than the sea winds, because then the waves of both seas were breaking on the shore. How a heavily loaded ship with a draft of three meters could be tossed and sink on a one-meter-deep shoal, even the sailors who had not experienced the storm near Kolka did not understand.
NK 47,48
