A bridge too far

It probably wasn’t really a word at all, before the age of marketing and PR, when distorting reality came to be regarded as a skill. After all, a bridge goes over things, and sea can’t be said to go over itself.

In the case of Trinidad and Tobago, it was no doubt designed to make the two entities sound more like one. So somebody seized on a term that freight companies had developed to make the process of shipping goods from one land mass to another sound simpler.

Islands are very often beautiful and charming places, having beaches because by definition they are surrounded by sea. They are pieces of the earth that used to be joined to somewhere else.

Islands make you realize the world really is unimaginably old, when solid rock gets breached and prised apart. It didn’t happen overnight. Nothing on that scale has happened in our recorded history, but it has happened in the past and it will happen again.

Islands also inevitably have access problems. The first visitors to the Caribbean islands came across by canoe and continued to conduct their pillaging and abduction trips that way until eventually bigger vessels were invented.

Paddles gave way to oars, which were superseded by sails and then big, heavy, noisy steam engines. Diesel raised its ugly, powerful head. Wooden hulls were replaced by steel ones and eventually fibreglass.

But still it was a palaver to get from mainland to island and back. The way it transpired here, because these islands were claimed by countries other than those in the north of South America, the mainland ceased to be the chief destination, and going from one island to the other became the routine.

Although modes of transport grew faster, the slick talkers of the 20th century were impatient, and if they couldn’t make something with the solid immediacy of an actual bridge, they could at least use a term that conjured up the idea.

It’s the “seabridge” that has been making unwanted headlines recently, because the boats keep breaking down. Bridges don’t do that, apart from the few that move, like the up-and-down split of Tower Bridge in London, and the humbler but equally entertaining one in Curacao, which is hinged at one end and swings open horizontally like a huge petrol- operated gate, its bulk supported by dinghy-like floats.

Ships have mechanical failures.

They have them frequently, it seems. And old ones inevitably break down more often because of wear and tear. We know this, because we have seen a few come and go over the years. But has there ever been a more unreliable service than the one that exists in 2017? Dr Rowley, no stranger to inter- island travel, if more often the aerial variety, went to try the marine option for himself recently and duly found himself stuck on the water while the bloody-minded engines demonstrated that they are no respectors of rank.

When I first came to these islands I found myself on a twinhulled vessel that was eerily familiar because I had been on one just like it (if not the very same one) many times before in the English Channel. That part of the world has similar requirements to this, and if it is any consolation, they’re having trouble in the Channel Islands too. A year or two ago the ferry operator, Condor, took delivery of a big new piece of cutting edge marine technology that they christened Liberation, a play on words that combines the freedom of the islands after occupation by the Germans during the Second World War with the notion of a quick and easy option for getting to and from the UK and France.

But the Liberation kept breaking down. It still keeps breaking down. They despise and ridicule the thing over there.

In the realm of vehicle manufacturing, there is the supposed phenomenon of the “Friday car”, imperfect but pushed through the system and off the conveyor belt quickly because the week is over and it’s time for a drink at the Duck and Peasant.

Maybe we’ve simply been unlucky and got ourselves a Friday boat. In which case it should be foisted upon the first available buyer, while our brave boys and girls seek out a better replacement.

With a new paint job and a change of name, the TT Express could be operating a disrupted service off the coast of Thailand next year.

But TT transport operators take note: don’t buy the Liberation when Condor finally decides to get rid of it. It hasn’t sunk (yet) but it is so unreliable that sometimes they wish it would.

By the way, if you’re looking for a cheap cargo vessel, there’s one on a beach in the Turks & Caicos Islands. It ran aground in a storm in 2012 and it’s still there.

L o o k s okay to me. And my finder’s fee - shall we say ten percent?