It had to happen in the end!

Nigel and I left Harlingen on a wet and windy Sunday heading for the lock into the Zuider Zee. 

After an hour bashing into wind and tide we tied up alongside the wharf to wait for the next lock and retired below to strip off our dripping waterproofs. 20 minutes later the lock lights went green, we started the engine and cast off. I engaged the engine –clunk, the engine stalled. I recognised that sound and my heart sank. I leapt ashore and got a rope around the bollard before we drifted away from the wharf and stopped to consider the situation, we had a rope round the propeller. It was a while before I figured out which rope had done the damage and, whilst some what perplexed as to how the rope had got round the prop, I felt rather stupid. I had put a rope under the hull for another purpose, tied it tightly to the rails and, as it ran under the boats keel it should have stayed well clear of the prop; it hadn’t.  I was in for a dip – at least the sun could have been shining! I carry a mask and snorkel on board for exactly this eventuality and a wet suit vest for a little warmth. This lot donned and a sharp knife in hand I went under the hull. 

Happily the rope came away quite easily and no damage was done and the water temperature wasn’t too bad although I was a little shivery after 10 minutes in the water. Thank goodness it didn’t happen in Norway! We set off for the next lock and into the Zuider Zee.

This is a stunningly beautiful place and what’s more quite unexpected.

In the 17^th century the Dutch were a very successful colonial power and lead the way in world trade until they were superseded by the British in the early 18^th century. The Zuider Zee was a shallow bay off the North Sea in the north west corner of the Netherlands extending 60 miles inland and 30 miles wide and only 10-15’deep. Trade started in what were originally small fishing villages on the shores of the Zuider Zee which soon became significant walled towns trading at first with Baltic ports and the Hanseatic League and then with the rest of the world  as the empire grew. This trade brought huge wealth to these towns; ornately gabled houses, churches and spires to rival the greatest sprung up as the wealth mounted.

In the 1930’s the Zuider Zee was damned by a 20 mile long dyke. Water was pumped out to several feet below sea level and a whole new area of the Netherlands was reclaimed, now the county of Flevoland. The new lake is now fresh water.

Despite the new dam holding back the North sea, the lake waters are still above the level of much of the surrounding country side so there is a dyke around the whole lake  perimeter. Locks are needed at the entrance to every town where once again you drop down to go inland into the network of canals across the interior of the Netherlands built many hundreds of years ago and drained by a complex network of windmills.

Today these harbour towns have changed little. Cobbled streets run along side labyrinthine canal systems that allowed barges access to all the shops and warehouses in their time. The old Dutch barges still tie up at the dockside and the church spires with their carillon of bells play their delightful tunes to bring in the new hour. Flowers abound on the many bridges crossing the tree lined canals and most houses are several hundred years old.

Dutch barges still abound in every shape and size. The barges are instantly recognisable by their huge lee boards. In order to sail towards the wind a sailing boat needs a keel of some sort to prevent it from being blown sideways. In order to navigate the shallow waters of the Netherlands and the canals, wooden tear drop shaped boards are dropped down the side of the boat to overcome the need for a deep keel. When not in use they are pulled up the side of the boat. There are many hundreds of old barges but what is particularly nice to see is how many of these lovely character craft are still being built today.

Our first stop was at Hinderloopen on the western shore of the Zuider Zee. Our bike ride took us to se some of these sailing boats, both old at a yard specialising in renovation and new in a yard alongside.

Crossing the lake we anchored off Hoorn the most beautiful of all the harbour towns we were to see. The towns harbour entrance was guarded by a grand tower with two old barges moored in front the day we arrived.

More barges lined the inner harbour with a backdrop of the typical Dutch gabled houses. 

As we walked up the main street towards the old town hall it became apparent that something around here was very drunk and it wasn’t us!  Like our leaning tower that we saw in Leeuwarden the foundations of many of these buildings were clearly none too stable resulting in a street scene that Alice might have found through the looking glass; that isn't a photographic illusion that makes all the walls look as though they are leaning in, they really are!

Our next stop was Edam of cheese fame and it was Cheese Market day. The market happens weekly and is opened in grand style. First the town crier addresses the world to announce the imminent opening of the market. A wonderful precession of clog wearing musicians then parade down to the market where the cheese is brought in by cheese porters on the rather super porter carried ‘barrows’. The cheese is inspected and the auctioneering started – all a re-enactment of the ‘good old days’ but rather splendid none the less.

The famous cheese is made simply by separating the curds from the whey, adding a little something for the magic recipe then pressing the curds in to a mould to get the well known shape and left to ripen. Mild cheese takes a month to ripen, the stronger cheeses taking up to 10 months. When left, the cheese forms a yellow skin on the outside, slightly rubbery in consistency that we see on some cheeses. I’m afraid the famous red wax by which we know Edam cheese is a marketing ploy made up by some one outside the Netherlands to give the cheese its identity, you don’t see it on the cheeses here.

I thought this photo of the bike and church tower in the background summed up the whole area rather well!

Into the land of clogs and windmills

At Lauwersoog on the North Sea coast we locked into the first of many inland water ways reclaimed by the Dutch from the sea. ‘God made the earth and then the Dutch made Holland’ it has been said and how true it is with 26% of its area and 20% of its people below sea level, the lowest being a staggering 21’ below sea level!

Where every other lock in the world takes you up to go inland, the first thing we noticed in the lock was that we were going down. What a beautiful place we entered. It was a two day passage along the canals to cut off the north west corner of Holland (more correctly called the Netherlands, Holland  in fact covers only two of 7 of the Dutch counties).

Windmills (some that still worked but only for show), Dutch barges, pretty houses with the traditional stepped and decorated Dutch gables and flowers everywhere and the best part of all was the people. The first windmill we visited was just being set up. The head of the mill has to be rotated to face into wind; this is done by hand buy rotating by hand a large wheel which dragged the head round on its chains, hard graft for this old fellow!

We took a little detour to ride along the edge of the dyke that kept every bodies feet dry. Despite a good look we found no little boys with their fingers in the dykes - I think they have cracked the engineering now!

Navigation? This is my kind of navigation (once you have got your head round the spelling of some of the place names!)











And as for the biking, well this is of course the land of bicycles but how about this for a cycle path? You could land a jet on it - it even has median lines!! That is the dyke to the right.

Holland is known to be flat; well, it really is, completely flat!

The first day in the canal, with a warm following easterly wind, we had a lovely sail through many small villages to the old port town (10 miles as the crow flies from the sea) of Leeuwarden with the Netherlands answer to the leaning tower of Pisa.  

Fortunately buildings took a while to go up in the 16^th century.  Three years into building the tower which was started in 1529 the foundations started to sink into the somewhat waterlogged ground. Building was stopped before being restarted several decades later in an attempt to straighten the tower giving it this rather crooked look. The tower now leans 5’ out of vertical; its not as much as its famous counterpart in Italy but that’s not a bad effort! To really see the lean you have to look at the granite ledge running round the tower a few feet above the ground.

The many bridges on the canal all opened on demand.


















We paid our fees to this nice fellow who swung a clog on the end of a line into which you put a few Euros - very quaint!

Another days travel on the canal on a very blustery day took us back to the North sea coast at Harlingen where I said goodbye to Chris to continue his travels round Europe. An old university friend, Nigel Morris joins me for the next leg to Amsterdam.

The Frisian Islands

With a calmer sea and moderate wind we had a great sail across from Cuxhaven at the end of the Kiel Canal to Wangerooge, the most easterly of the Frisian Islands. There are 7 German Islands and 5 Dutch islands in the chain stretching about 100 miles along the north German and Dutch coasts, each island about 6 miles long.

The islands are really little more than sand bars that some grass and a few trees have managed to cling to! The islands were first popular long ago with monks looking to get away from it all as they do. Now each island has its own community and they have all become major beach holiday destinations.

Coming in to the channel towards the island from the North Sea we came across a colony of seals. There were a lot of young pups, some as small as a couple of feet long; cute and cuddly and considerably quicker over the ground than their somewhat blubbery parents when we got a bit close!

The centre of Wangerooge is a picturesque holiday resort with everyone getting about on bikes as there were no cars on the island. Cycling along the sea front we came across these rather super 'beach baskets', our wind break and deck chair all rolled into one. Mike and I had come across these before in Poland but these were off course much swisher!

From Wangerooge we headed west along the chain. The second island, Spiekeroog was well, another long sand dune, the third, Langeoog – yes, you get the drift. Getting from one island to another was however somewhat more entertaining. 

The islands are about 5 miles off the mainland coast with the water in between characterised by its lack of water – the whole lot dries out at low tide! This made for some interesting navigation. We set out from Wageorooge at about half tide so that we would hit the shallowest parts (yes literally) on a rising tide; that gave us about 3 hours of rising tide with a couple more hours of good water up our sleeve. The channels are continuously moving so charts are useless; they are marked by a series of withies, long willow saplings, driven into the sand at the edge of the channel and moved as required.

We set off into our first withie marked channel and very soon found the bottom.

Moondance has a lifting keel and with the keel up draws only 0.8 meters. I had hoped to find more water than that in the channel at this state of the tide! No matter, we dropped the anchor to wait for the tide to lift us off so we could continue which it duly did, happily just as another yacht passed us – on the other side of the withies! I had misunderstood the markings on the withies and headed down the wrong side – better luck next time. I was at least made to feel better by seeing the other yacht hit the bottom a few hundred yards ahead of us, but then he didn’t have a lifting keel!

Now that we had got to grips with the navigation we had a very pleasant evenings sail to Langeoog.

Tidal times and shallow depths became so tying that we did the rest of the trip along the islands on the North Sea side in plenty of water.

Chris had some friends staying on the German island of Juist that he wanted to meet up with so we anchored the boat off the beach and headed ashore in the dinghy where Chris’s friends stood waving, as did an official looking fellow with a red flag. As we hit the beach the official, who I think was beach patrol, came charging over communicating something to us loudly and forcibly in his best German. I invited him to try again in English as the only word I picked up was ‘verbotten’. He explained in his finest English this time (but no less forcibly) that dinghys were not allowed on the beach within 3 km’s of the village. What? How many dinghys do you suppose try and land on the wavey North Sea side of his island?! I told him that this sounded like a silly rule and suggested that he ignore it and let us see our friends that Chris had come all the way over from Australia to see. He looked at me as if I had 3 heads and explained again that this was a rule, dinghies on the beach were verboten. Germans it seems do not do flexibility! Poor Chris was spitting blood having made so much effort to meet up with his friends. Chris left Germany 30 years ago because he could not stand the German rules and rigidity – here was a very good reminder for him as to why he left and there were many less than polite expletives and gestures about Germany over the next day or two!

Unperturbed by Chris’s dislike of all things German this little fellow landed on the deck yesterday. Now, pigeons have a certain reputation, so I explained to it in no uncertain terms that if he left an unwanted present then he would end up in a pie for dinner. Unfortunatly the threat didn’t work; shortly after he had left Chris showed me his coat which was hung out to dry with a long runny white mess down the sleeve. This was of course hilarious, right up to the moment that Chris produced my water proof trousers carrying very similar markings!

Yesterday we left German waters. Chris took the opportunity whilst ashore shopping in the morning to relieve himself on German soil as a final gesture of defiance. With a few last departing gestures and expletives from Chris we crossed into the Dutch half of the islands. We decidd not to continue along the islands but rather to go into the short canal system which we decided would be a more interesting route down to the Zuider Zee and on to Amsterdam.

The Kiel Canal

On 19 June Gordon and I arrived in Kiel at the Baltic end of the Kiel Canal where I wanted to leave the boat to come home for a couple of weeks. We were very lucky to find a berth;  it turned out to be the local race week and Kiel being the Baltic equivalent of our Cowes week was chocker block booked. Happily we did manage to find a berth 10 miles from the city center.

We had an interesting time getting in. It was blowing about 20 knots and I was allocated a berth a little way up an alley of posts. How they do it here is to park between two of a line of posts that run parallel to the pontoon, you then swing the boat between two of the posts and moor with the boats bows to the pontoon and secured at the stern on the posts. Unfortunately they neglected to tell me that the width between the two lines of posts was 15 meters – the length of my boat is 13.5 – a tad tight. It did look tight but doable – right up to the moment when I swung my bows in towards the posts and realised that the strength of the wind against the bow was simply not going to let the boat turn fast enough to get between the boats – I hit the brakes. I now had a problem. I had an umpteen point turn to do with a little under a meter of room at each end of the boat with 20 knots of wind making it quite clear who was in charge! To cut a  long and somewhat stressful story short I did manage to do my u turn and get out of the trot to retire to a much easier berth to access.  The boat was secure and it was time to sample Kiel.

The up side of the lack of parking in race week was that it was party time in Kiel. There were bands playing in every square and stalls selling every food and drink imaginable. This was an interesting smoked fish stand, cooked to order! 

And of course no party would be complete here without a German beer tent and a fellow dressed in his lederhosen and playing the accordion – knees up Mother Brown ( or some German equivalent!)

 After a lovely couple of weeks at home with Melanie I am back on the boat with Chris, an Australian friend. Chris is originally from  Germany but emigrated to Australia 30 odd years ago so with a crew who spoke the lingo perhaps my days of guessing what the milk was and what was in the sausages were over?!

The first part of our trip was going to be through the Kiel Canal. The Canal, built in 1887, is a 50 mile short cut from the North Sea to the Baltic. It is a big canal having been widened to 100 meters just before the first world war to take Dreadnought battleships. There are locks at both ends of the canal to cope with the small tidal differences between the Baltic and the North Sea. Locks I had done before but these were something else – they were huge, but then the canal was built for some serious ocean going traffic! Moored alongside the wall with a container ship towering over us we were lifted the few feet  to the same level as the North Sea and we set off into the canal. 

We found a pretty lay bye for the night, one of those idyllic anchorage surrounded by mill pond calm water and trees – what I hadn’t counted on was the autobahn than ran over our heads just a few hundred yards away – so much for lonely peaceful anchorages!

All along the canal were little ferries carrying people and cars. Here was an interesting piece of German ingenuity using a railway bridge to sling the 'ferry' underneath - neat!

We were against the wind so were motoring - it can be such hard work - Chris chilling at the wheel!

We motored 30 miles on our second day to another anchorage (carefully chosen to avoid the autobahn) then headed ashore on our bikes to explore a little bit of this part of Germany with its inhabitants living in some interesting places - a very regal looking pair of storks had found some prime real estate. 

We came across this wonderful windmill in a builders merchants yard that, although much altered inside, does still work today. The owner allowed the adventurous to clamber up inside the mill and have a look around. Judging by the layers of dust not many people had taken him up on his invitation! What a wonderful machine; huge wooden beams, a gigantic 8’ diameter wooden drive wheel attached to the rotor blades drive shaft and the mechanism to keep the whole shooting match turned into the wind – all still in some sort of working order. An engineers delight! This is the gear at the top of the windmill with the main shaft running through the centre.

The ceilings housed several families of young Swallows. Notice how the nest is  not sat on a ledge but ‘glued’ onto the end of a spar. The mother bird sticks little mud balls together with saliva to make the nest thus avoiding the ravages of  rats hunting in the eaves.

On the way home we met this young bride and groom in front of some farm buildings. I hope Hubby is happy with her, I found her a little prickly.

We are now sat storm bound in Cruxhaven at the mouth of the river Elbe having left the canal yesterday. There is a force 8 blowing outside and enormous cacophony of squeaking ropes and rattling rigging is serenading us! We spent the day exploring Bremerhaven, 20 miles up the Elbe by train. The boys in the RAF gave this whole area a real pasting at the start of the war as this is the only small stretch of German coast on the North Sea (and of course the locks of the canal took a pounding) so there is almost nothing left post war which makes the towns and cities rather characterless.

The wind is forecast to moderate tomorrow so we hope to head for the Frisian island - the land of Erskin Childers 'Riddle of the Sands'.