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A round at Bar Verloren

29 August 2026

Vinkeveen Vice

There is a bar on Get Lost Island, and until today it was scenery.

You could see it from the water, a long low room with a terrace, and a sign that is the only lit thing for two hundred metres. You could sail past it. You could moor next to it and stand on the bank looking at it. That was the whole of the experience.

Now it serves.

Moor, step ashore with Space, walk up to it, and hold Space for a round. It is on foot on purpose. Out on the water Space already means four things depending on what is in reach, and a fifth would have made mooring at the terrace ambiguous. So you have to get out of the boat and walk, which makes this the first thing on the lake worth walking to. Land used to be somewhere to hide from the police. Now it is somewhere to go.

A round costs you the helm and pays you the score. For a minute and a half you are gezellig: the throttle gives you a little less than you asked for and the boat pulls, gently and not always the same way. In exchange every second on the water is worth more. The two start together and stop together, so there is no quiet stretch at the end where you are still being paid for a drink you have already sailed off.

Whether that is a good trade is, honestly, the open question. The drunk helm had been sitting in the code since the beginning without anybody ever being able to feel it, so the numbers on both sides of the deal are first guesses. The payout is deliberately small until somebody has sailed a few laps of the Noordplas with a drink in them and reported back.

The waterpolitie, for now, have no opinion about any of this. Give them time.

MeerBeter Vinkeveen Vice. Nine kilometres an hour, strictly enforced. Play in your browser: meerbeter.com

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