Piet Sinke photographing ships

The man behind the news

About Piet Sinke

Captain · photographer · founder of Maasmond Maritime

Captain Piet Sinke

Piet Sinke
Captain

"My life"

From a boy watching ships to a salvage captain

Since he was born, Piet was fascinated by the maritime world. As a young boy living in a flat in Maassluis, he could watch the ships pass by from the apartment window — and started photographing them. At sixteen he chose a seaman's career and joined his first ship in 1975: the Smit London, freshly delivered by the De Merwede shipyard.

He sailed on several ocean-going tugs of Smit, working his way up from messboy to able seaman. In 1979 he studied for his master's ticket at the maritime college in Flushing, returned to the ocean-going tugs, and was promoted to Captain with Smit International Ocean Towage & Salvage.

Smit London — at the Parkkade in Rotterdam
Containership — Rotterdam
Rotterdam — Oilship

Projects around the world

Salvage, towage and the toughest of conditions

Over many years with Smit, Piet was involved in countless projects. One of the largest was the Ganaveh project in Iran in 1986, where he was pullmaster as a 750-tonne barge pulled oil pipes up to 21 km from the beach into the sea — carried out while the region was under regular air attack during the Iran–Iraq war.

From 1990 he worked out of the Smit Singapore office, sailing permanently in the Far East as captain on work barges, tugs and suppliers. Those years, he says, were the best of his life — and it was in Singapore that he met Elizabeth, who would later become his wife.

Returning to Rotterdam in 1999, he joined the teams behind the 2nd Beneluxtunnel, the Thomassen Tunnel, the salvage of the Kursk, the wreck removal of the Twin Star off Callao in Peru, and the salvage of the Umfolozi in Walvis Bay. Among the most memorable were the pipe-pull projects in Dahej, India — completed in 2004 in currents up to 7 knots and tidal ranges close to 9 metres.

"The website"

How a few e-mails grew into a daily institution

In 2001 Piet began collecting maritime news and e-mailing it to a few friends. Word spread, the distribution list kept growing, and today tens of thousands of readers receive the clippings every single day. Many forward it on — some up to seventy copies daily — and crews aboard ships treat it as their daily shipping news.

Every clipping made since 2001 lives on this website and can be searched by ship name or keyword, browsing through more than two decades of maritime information and photography. The latest edition is published daily and can be read the same day, just like a newspaper.

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About Piet Sinke