Wrapped

photo by Chris Clarke

In other cities they "wrap" busses with advertising.
Well, in Venice they don't really have busses...or do they?
It's called a "vaporetto", but some folks say "water bus".
Is it any surprise that the vaporetto gets "wrapped?"

Vaporetto at Ferrovia

photo by Tamás Fehér

Here's a great evening shot taken by Tamás from the Ponte Scalzi of the vaporetto stop in front of Ferrovia Station.

"Skid-Brake"

While sitting out on the bow of a vaporetto one day, taking a ridiculous amount of pictures of everything even mildly interesting, I noticed this guy.

He was rowing from San Toma toward Rialto. It looked like he was making his way toward the Rio di San Polo but he was moving a bit fast for that corner, which is more than a ninety-degree turn.

I watched as he applied a remo technique that probably has a specific name, but for now I'm calling it the "skid-brake".

Invariably someone will read this and say "Oh, that's a ___". Please feel free to chime in with an informative comment to let us know what you've heard it called.

And for the rest of you, I encourage you to throw out your own comments, indicating what you think it ought to be called.

So here's a photo sequence:

Gondolier rowing toward the Rio di San Polo.

That corner is a blind one, in fact if someone was coming toward the Grand Canal, they would see the ferro of the gondola right about here as it came into view.

From my vantage point on the vaporetto, I could see that the canal was clear, but the gondolier was still not in a position to know. He must have done this so many times that it didn't faze him. Because that's along the Grand Canal, gondoliers can't just swing really wide for the turn, so they've got a trick up their sleeve.

As the gondolier came into the turn, he placed his remo just aft of the forcola in the sotomorso position, and began to pry over. This "skid-brake" allowed him to come into a turn in a flat bottomed boat without skidding over. The remo served as a sort of keel, tracking his boat through the turn, and helping him stay as tight to the corner as possible. This technique allowed the gondolier to avoid a rail-to-rail collision with the guy who buzzed in on the motorboat, ignoring the sign forbidding such traffic in that canal.

Towards the end of the turn, the gondolier got his remo into a nice flex, while leaning out a bit to starboard.

The "skid-brake". Anybody got another name for it?

First Photo Out of the Can

I went to Venice this year with many goals.
One of those goals was to take a lot of pictures.
In that I succeeded; in fact I took more than I know what to do with at this point.
We're still recovering from the trip and the ensuing jet lag, but I've begun downloading the images and have been faced with a tough decision:
Which one to post first?

I thought about many different themes to begin with,
but in the end I chose one of the first ones out of the camera.

This was taken on our last full day in Venice from the Vaporetto.
The front seats on Venice's water bus boats are some of the best seats anywhere - to see and absorb it all.

This was shot somewhere between the train station and Rialto.
I got a kick out of the gondolier; he just kept rowing, paying little mind to the Vaporetto.
I'm sure he knew that the ACTV boat had right-of-way, but he just kept on rowing.

In the end it timed out perfectly because the Vaporetto kept making stops.
We never actually passed the guy.
I began to wonder if he'd had it all figured out in his head...or just a really big ego.