Menno Marrenga

*Menno Marrenga* descends from an old line of Groningen zeetjalk skippers that took to engineering two generations ago. He was born in 1952 on the beach in Kalimantan, and after that he spend most of his life near water. He grew up in the lagoons of Curacao, spend his youth sculling skiffs and sailing his tjotter in Holland while studying (uncharacteristically) solid state physics. After that he roamed the Suriname coastal plain and seashore in a home made kayak, and found out the hard way why it is called the Wild Coast. He went to Saamaka in 1989 - during the inland war, and when some idiots start shooting one has to move fast and then one can not wait to find a skipper, All this explained how Menno Marrenga became the first and only outsider who learned to navigate the Saamaka river in outboard motor powered dugouts from Atjoni all the way to Luangu.

But Menno Marrenga is an engineer, not an adventurer. Engineers love to break down barriers, but they hate adventures: they study the risks first, and work out all kinds of precautions before they move. Menno is known in Saamaka as the timid man who sits on boulders for hours, poking his pitot-gauge into the stream, scribbling diagrams in his notebook, trying out escape routes before he takes off. That is how this booklet happened.

Up to now, Menno has an unblotted safety record. He travels singlehanded up and down the river with his dugout canoe loaded with equipment, but in fifteen years lost no more of his cargo than one paddle.