So it is WOW in Cuxhaven. After my brief spell in gold mining and platinum exploration I switched into the oil industry, the early years of which were spent working on an oil rig as a well-site geologist of the south coast of South Africa, a place that has a bit of a reputation for weather, especially in the southern hemisphere winter. We sent in detailed daily reports about the formations we had drilled and a graphic equivalent, called the “Litholog” and the “Composite Log” (and now I just write the Baltic B-Log). The shortest of these reports and entries on the logs were when you just wrote WOW and filled in the date and a few other parameters. WOW meant waiting on weather. Well, here we are in Cuxhaven, WOW and it looks like 2 days of it! Not bad really… this is only the 2nd time in 3 months that we have had to WOW, the 1st time was on the 2nd day of the trip.

This little corner of the North Sea and the Elbe estuary is renowned as a tricky place to get out of. Dylan joined us in Rendsburg in the middle of the Kiel Canal to help us with the sail but even the day before he arrived we could see that there were a few weather bombs predicted. As it turns out, the weather is foul until Monday, which is the day we all intended flying back from Amsterdam, having built in two continguency days! So… Dylan needs to go back on said day and Mart and Veronica will be sailing from Cuxhaven on our own taking two or three days to get to Delfzijl where we will leave the boat for a week. That said we are not the only ones waiting for Monday, everybody is in the same boat (another one of those numerous nautical terms that we use without thinking about the origin).

Yesterday, today and Sunday there are some tight low pressure cells with 35 knots plus, 4 to 5 m waves, rain and moderately high CAPE too (Convective Available Potential Energy). There is no ways we are going to sea in that. Next week looks much better, the wind sets NE and easterly at 10 to 15 knots, just what we need to get out of this corner. The challenges are the tides that funnel in and out of the Elbe, a long passage with few and/or difficult runs for shelter and arriving at a “Seegat” to time the flood tide there too, to get into the narrow and shallow channel leading through the Frisian Islands. Getting all that to happen in the right sequence is about as challenging as passage planning gets.

We are in Cuxhaven City Marina, conveniently close to the Old City. Right now it is subject to a redevelopment. They are building some rather nice apartments on the edge of the marina but it does have a construction site feel to it. It is however, totally sheltered, with water, electricity but alas, no Wi-Fi. We have not yet found any unprotected networks or nearby bars that we can see via the boats Wi-Fi booster and go and get the password for, for the price of a drink. We are reduced to having to walk over a kilometre to McDonald’s to buy coffee and use their Wi-Fi to change flights and do other odds and sods, most importantly download updated weather and GRIB files. So it most likely this blog will be posted from my favourite restaurant, the one I try to visit zero times per annum.

So the past few days have definitely started to feel like we are going home. After the boys at the British Kiel yacht club had roped in the bar lady, supposedly just for us, it turned out a little bit like I suspected. The fish pie took longer than expected and the bar lady was showing up at 19h30. At 8 we felt duty bound to have the supper later and go into the bar. The barlady was this buxom, fun loving attractive girl who was German and just happened to be married to a Scottish chap who was one of 4 permanent British army employees there. It turned out there was a Kenyan amongst them who was having a birthday. The rest of them were punishing him with shots. We had a great evening and eventually left them playing cards with the bar lady around the right side of the bar controlling the game and writing down the score. I had a bit of a report with the Kenyan, I knew a fair bit about Kenya and that part of East Africa and I was also interested how he ended up in the British army. Turns out his Grandfather had joined the Scottish rifles near the end of the 2nd World War and then it became a bit of a family tradition. What was really interesting was that his Grandfather had been in Burma during the war. About 5 years ago, I was going out to a gas field in Bangladesh, on the Myramar (Burma) border and we stopped at a war graveyard, maintained by the British war graves commission. I was amazed at how many African people were in there from the African British colonies. I remember, with a heavy heart, musing at the time, whether their families back in Africa ever got properly informed etc. I digress outward; I guess the sailing piece here is that you meet very interesting people. Sadly, it turns out that in 2 years time the lease on the BKYC expires and will not be renewed as it is costing the British taxpayer too much. The substantial fleet of training yachts will move to Gosport and be run by joint services.

The next day we took the boat over to Laboe on the other side of the Kielerfjord and did a short stay while we visited the U-boat museum, well the museum is the U-boat. Well worth a visit and again another eerie reminder of what people put themselves through in the war years, as well as a testament to some amazing engineering and construction feats.

After that we headed over to the Kiel Canal lock and pulled up to a waiting pontoon that said, “waiting pontoon for pleasure craft” and nothing else. We called in on the designated channel telling them we were on the waiting pontoon outside the old locks. We waited about half an hour and seeing no activity we called in again, asking politely, if they could give us an indication of how long we would have to wait. A rather sarcastic voice announced that if we were in front of the old locks we would wait forever because they were under repair, we needed to come around to the big lock, the one that takes the behemoths. This was contrary to what the pilot guide advised and you would think they could have put another sign on the waiting pontoon to say the old lock is broken/kaput? It would be wishful thinking but we ended up with a whole behemoth lock to ourselves and thought that perhaps they felt slightly guilty about leaving us out there and hence gave us our own lock. I somehow doubt it however as they are only concerned with the commercial shipping. Anyway, I immediately thought we had got our moneys worth for the very reasonable €35 canal fee.

We had a 3-hour motor up the canal to Rendsburg, where we arrived at 7pm. The weather was on and off rain the next day and we did some washing and went into town where they had this most fantastic farmers plus fish and meat market. I met Dylan at the station at 13h00. We had to stock up on sinners’ food to cater for him, beer, bread, biscuits and other carbohydrate stuff.

With a strong wind on the beam, we had a tricky but excellently executed extraction from between the 2 stern poles. We simply rig a bowline back to the secondary winch and then winch yourself back to the pole with the primary keeping the bowline taught. Once at the pole, in quick succession, you go astern like hell, lift the loop off the pole, slip the bow line, bow thrusting the boat straight as necessary.

We went about 15 NM down the canal and turned off at the Gieselau canal spur. We went in about 0.75NM up the spur and stayed at the marina just before the first lock. It was a tranquil little sleepy hollow deep in the trees with a single track lifting bridge over the lock. We had a very quiet “off the grid” night there and the next day, when we went to see the lock miester, he said it was for free.

By this stage, we knew that we were going to be dealing with weather bombs in the North Sea, so we were slowing things down. We stayed a night inside the lock at Brunsbuttel and then locked out the next day and made our way, being flushed down the pipe with a strong wind on the front quarter, down the Elbe to Cuxhaven.

Dylan is unfortunately flying home from here on Monday and we will change or flights so we can still be back to take Tayo to Uni and allow a bit of Mom and daughter pre-Uni shopping. So passage plan from here is WOW today and tomorrow, leave here at 08h00 on Monday for the 76 NM to Norderney. This means we will have to push the last of the flood for an hour but then get the whoosh of the ebb after about 09h45. Favourable tide until about 14h00 all the way along the east Friesland islands with the wind 10 to 15knts on the beam. With a 5 to 6 knot average SOG, that should put us off Norderney’s Busetief Seegat in time to get in there on the flood, which turns at about 20h30. Plan B, C, D etcetera are ducking into Baltrum (sea state dependent), carrying on into the darkness to the well lit and deeper entrance of the Ems estuary (but possibly fighting the ebb tide to go in there) or the least favoured plan, bailing back to Helgoland. Weather and wind look good on Monday so plan A should be fine.

From Norderney we will hopefully take the significant short cut to Delfzijl around the back of Juist and through the Memmert Balje. This will require a super early departure, keel up to the max and nudge our way through with the rising flood; we then have to race to make the next tidal watershed just opposite Eemshaven. If we don’t make that tidal gate we will just have to toss an anchor or dry out and wait for the high tide in the evening. It will be interesting. We plan then to leave the boat just inside the canals (start of the mast up route) in Delfzijl, for about a week, go home, sort the kids. Maybe we will then drive the car back to Holland leave it somewhere on the Isselmeer, catch the train back to the boat and spend 2 weeks on the mast up route with the dog on the boat. Lets see how this all works out; all subject to change due to safety rationale, logistical reasons and other practicalities.