‘It’s a humongous restoration project,’ tells skipper Jens Schrauwen about his tugboat Mea Vota, which he owns since 2018. ‘It had been laid off for years, hadn’t been maintained for years.’ The Mea Vota, built in 1923 by the Arnhemsche Steam Slipway Company as the Gelria II, is a beautiful boat. But the pièce de resistance is the engine, a MWM RH 134 SU of 330 hp at 500 revs. That it’s directly reversible, doesn’t make it special by itself. That the reversing mechanism is visible on top of the engine, however does. ‘We lift up the push rods, then we shift the camshaft sideways and then we put the push rods back. At the front end of the engine, there’s a sort of gear that runs on top of the cylinders.’ Of course we’re shown the reversing from multiple angles. Afterwards, we go sailing in the harbor of Dinteloord, where skipper Schrauwen demonstrates what the engine can do and how manoeuvrable the boat is. But not everybody is happy with that.

00:00 Intro
00:47 About the engine
02:16 Prepumping oil
05:05 Cranking the flywheel
06:19 Lubing cylinder valves
07:05 Opening air bottle
07:21 Starting the engine
07:53 Reversing mechanism
09:45 Sailing away
10:56 About the Mea Vota 1
11:54 Manoeuvres
12:37 About the Mea Vota 2
13:33 Confrontation
15:45 Ship’s horn