It is interesting how the legal status of boats varies widely from one European country to another. On one end there is a group of countries, let me call them liberal, where registration of reasonably sized yachts is voluntary. The UK, the Netherlands and Sweden are part of this group. (All of them monarchies, by the way.) On the other end of the spectrum are the countries I will call bureaucratic, where the tiniest floating contraption has to be registered. The republics of Croatia and Portugal are infamous examples.
In the liberal countries, you get yourself a boat and go out and enjoy being on the water. The overwhelming majority of sailors manage to keep themselves out of trouble and have no dealings with any sort of maritime authority whatsoever. By contrast, in the bureaucratic countries you are obliged to prove that you legally own the boat, that you have paid VAT (if you bought a new-ish boat), that it complies with the dreaded CE regulations... The later is a particularly serious hassle if your floating dream is the product of your own craftsmanship.
Then there is the whole rigmarole with flags. For historical reasons, boats are supposed to have a flag. In posh-British-naval lingo, it is called
wearing an insignia. Whatever you call it, it probably comes from the days when ships coming upon each other at sea had no other way of telling friend from foe. It transpires that even then the respectable Royal Navy often misled enemies by flying false colours. They would approach their prey flying a neutral flag, and out of courtesy (they were gentlemen after all) would hastily hoist the Union Jack (in the appropriate maritime flavour, blue, red or white) a few seconds before cannoning the unsuspecting target to the bottom of the ocean.
This was a protracted introduction to the subject of Mekicevica's flag. In the Netherlands, she wouldn't have to be registered and we could
wear whatever insignia we felt like. Even if we were not planning to shoot cannonballs at anyone. But to take her to the Adriatic we needed to obey to all the absurd demands of the bureaucratic cultures. Thus it came to be that Mekicevica was dutifully registered in Gent, and received a permission from His Majesty the King of the Belgians to
wear the Belgian insignia.
Unfortunately, Mekicevica spends more time in chilly Zeeland that in the balmy Adriatic. Nevertheless, as law-abiding citizens we felt compelled to
wear the Belgian insignia. The downside is that we often meet francophone Belgians who naturally address us in French; when it turns-out we don't really speak any French, but are more confident in Dutch we are classified as obnoxious Flemish who are too stupid to learn French.
Enough of that! We are rebelling against meaningless regulations and foolish prejudice: from now on Mekicevica is
wearing the Portuguese insignia.
