AND
THE WINNER IS…
I’m very
pleased to introduce you one of the photos winner of the photo-contest Efoplistis – Hellenic Seaways, gaining a trip to Chios. I’m a very modest
person, and anyone who knows me well can confirm it; I don’t want to
celebrate myself, but only a 2006 year which was fantastic under the ferry
aspect, underlining 20 years of ferry passion (how many ferries from the “Ionian
Star” on Summer 1986 to “Raffaele Rubattino”, the
last ferry of 2006). I think that this victory is fully deserved: not for the
photo, as long as often the care doesn’t last, and my photo would have
been only a good one and nothing more if the friend “Jonathan Livingstone”
hadn’t passed in my lens in a so good position. If it would have been
flying a little lower, I would have deleted the photo, returning to the Nescafe
which was waiting me in a cafè of Piraiki. In any case, for me this awarding is due to the
child who learned by heart on the brochures (internet? What is internet?) the timetables and the fleets of Strintzis,
Marlines, ANEK and Ventouris Ferries; to the boy
that, at Heraklion, after some days photographing Minoic palaces and museums, in front of the strange funnel
of “Crown M” thought: “Why not starting taking photos of the
ships?”. The child who spent 210.000 Italian lires
in 1992 to buy a Yashica camera with fixed lens to
start that strange hobby, the child who drew hundred of imaginary vessels, the
child which made the first shot to a ship at Ancona
in 1993, picturing the “Crown M”, the same ship which led to him
the idea to photograph the ferries; the boy which casually discovered on
internet, in 2000, websites relating to ferries, full of photos of gigantic
ferries as the Viking, the Silja, the Color, but not displaying the “Ionian Island”,
the “Patmos” and the “Candia”.
Thinking that also these ferries
deserved its consideration, I started building my website, which nowadays is
adriaticandaegeanferries.com . For this reason I think that this is a
great victory; but considering myself as a “shipspotter”,
and that the photo contest of Efoplistis and Hellenic
Seaways is dedicated to the shipspotters, I think
that this is also a victory of the shipspotting’s
world. This would sound like a “legitimating” the shipspotting, which surely was the target of this contest.
Thanks very much: nowadays taking a photo of a ship could be part of Olympic
sports, having been so hard: “sealed” harbours, private policemen
and port officers with a big and incomprehensible zeal, photos to a lounge
forbidden due to safety reasons. But what safety we’re talking about? We
don’t know it but, during these mad times following the terrorism
committed by some idiots fought by some others which are playing the role of
the “sheriff”, instead that leaving themselves in their insane
behaviour, it seems to be more dangerous a man with a camera, eventually
agreeing to be identified, rather than a passenger travelling with its car
which decides to make it exploding when parked in the lower hold during the sea
crossing. We should also remember that the terrorists of September 11th
were travelling with a regular first class ticket, and not “jetspotters”, if they exhist…and,
surely, I think that it isn’t the same thing shooting a bridge or an
engine control room, which could be reasonably forbidden, rather than shooting
a restaurant or a shop. Nowadays the ferry is not a competitive way of
travelling in front of other ways, but many of us still prefer it to other solutions
because the ship is also an emotion, and the shiplover
must be free to love the ship as he want enjoying his freedom. So why not
attempting to make the shipspotters’s life more easy? I think we should do it, and anyone who wants to
help me this way should feel himself free to write to mlulurgas@hotmail.com , I’ll
publish all the messages and let’s hope we’ll be able to do
something for the shipspotting!
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