Romanian pilgrims on the" Jesus Boat"

Several years ago, a couple of guys living around the Sea of Galilee made the find of a lifetime: they discovered nearly intact a Sea of Galilee fishing boat that ultimately was dated to the first century A.D., the kind of craft that St. Peter, a resident of the lakeside village of Capernum, would have used to make a living. These two guys were Galilean versions of the people you see on beaches with metal detectors: When the waters of the lake recided, they'd put on their Wellies and wade through the mud and see what artifacts they might find. The thinking is that the boat probably was sunk during the Jewish rebellian against the Romans around 70 A.D., and that it sunk deeply into the lakebed's sediments, which somehow preserved the craft. It was lifted from the waters by the Israel Antiquities Authority, and finally after years of preservation work, it was placed in a museum at one end of the lake in a specially designed holding facility that also serves as a museum where it can be viewed.
One of the offshoots of the discovery was the entreprenurial creation of excursion boats, manufactured in Egypt, that are several times larger than the original boat, but modeled after it. The name "Jesus Boat" was trademarked by one of these Galilee businessmen, and today, you can take a boat ride from the Galilee port of Tiberias to the museum -- a 30-minute ride that also allows you to see the sights Christ and His apostles would have seen.
We launched from Tiberias on one of the boats -- that day there appeared to be half a dozen or so such craft on the water. As soon as each boat was launched, we could hear the singing of hymns from pilgrims as they rejoiced being on the holy sea. We happened to be on the boat with another group, members of the Philadelphia Romanian Assembly of God from Portland, Oregon. Virtually everyone on board was visiting the Holy Land for the first time except for their pastor, Nicki Pop, a 70-something dynamo of a man with a full shock of white hair and hands the size of ham hocks. He led his group in prayer and song, and before anyone from our group could grab a seat, members of the Portland church buttonholed each of us to learn if we had accepted Christ as our personal savior, and where were we from in the states. When I explained to Nicki that I was a Catholic from Cincinnati, he let go the questions of faith, instead telling me his life story. As a 19-year-old, he had been arrested in Romania by the Communist government, and "only by the work of Jesus Christ" was he saved from certain death. He was jailed for a couple years, and somehow found his way to the United States and Portland. As immigration patterns often go, word got out that Romanians were settling in Oregon, and soon there was an entire community there. We chatted for much of the boat ride, sang a couple songs that we could, like "Amazing Grace," although they were singing in Romanian. Everyone from our group was pleasantly engaged throughout the ride, and finally we docked at the museum pier.
The rest of the day, we ran into our Romanian friends as we explored the Galilee region.