Tears of joy for the freed shrimp cutter: ‘It’s sailing, it’s sailing!’ | Domestic

She can hardly believe it. She got a call around 5:30 on Saturday afternoon. Lisette was in her own pet shop to celebrate the five-year anniversary of her store. “It’s sailing, it’s sailing!” said the voice on the other end of the line. Via her phone she watched live what they had been waiting for for weeks. “This is fantastic news. Thanks to a brand new top towing cable, the cutter back out to sea,” she says with relief. It was made somewhat easier by the fact that the cutter had now moved a bit and was less stuck in the sand. The result was that the shrimp trawler slowly floated out to sea again on Saturday afternoon. “I cried tears of joy,” said Lisette.

She hasn’t been able to speak to her father yet. The idea is that he will return to work as soon as possible. That will probably be early next year. A fundraising campaign was organized for the family in recent weeks. Nearly 63,000 euros were raised there. “Weird, right? We are extremely grateful to everything and everyone,” he said on the phone. Because the Rekers can really use that money. Not only because father Ed had no income for weeks, but also to be able to renovate the cutter in such a way that he can sail with it again.

It almost seemed like a tourist attraction these past few weeks. Excavators drove back and forth around the IJM22 Black-Jack, the shrimp trawler that ran aground on a sandbank under stormy conditions on November 22. The shrimp trawler got into trouble when a rope got caught in the boat’s propeller. As a result, the IJM22 became out of control and the wind blew up a sandbank near Zandvoort. A personal tragedy for the skipper, who is one of the last small independent shrimp fishermen. “Every day he doesn’t sail and catch, he earns nothing. The fact that it is tied up hurts us,” Lisette, the skipper’s daughter, said earlier. “My father is 62 years old, the boat is also his pension.”

Previous attempts to tow the cutter back into the open water failed. The KNRM boats could not do much. During attempt two, the rope of a tugboat broke when it unexpectedly started to storm. And if that wasn’t enough, the storm also caused significant damage: the cabin door was broken, leaving the engine and equipment wet. And another thing: to make the cutter lighter, everything that was not needed was removed from the boat, such as the cooking pots in which the shrimps are cooked on board and the stainless steel cranes for hauling in the nets. To make matters worse, those cranes had also been stolen from a warehouse by thieves. ,,So sad.”