Winter is coming and the days are drawing near. On the morning of 28 September we woke up to heavy dew and steaming canals in a marina along the North Sea Canal between Ijmuiden and Amsterdam. We have had a lazy last 5 or 6 days in the canals. One of those was spent in Leeuwarden were the mooring in the canal was in the beautiful city gardens. There we learned that they were building aqueducts for the road to pass under the canal so that part of the mast up route was closed from 1 September. We were slightly disappointed, as we want to go to the rated town of Sneek. Instead we had to take the branch back to Harlingen, where we had been on the outward trip. This time we stayed in a marina on the freshwater side of the locks. The only remarkable feature of the marina was its 4.8m wide entrance. Going in was fine but Murphy was present on the exit and another boat came around the blind corner just before the narrow entrance, forcing some reversing and getting slightly sideways and bumping the wooden post doing about 1 knot. Nothing that a bit of rubbing compound won’t sort out or if necessary some white etch primer and a bit of Halford’s appliance white spray paint. We know Harlingen from our previous visit: , a characterful town that is steeped in history, with beautiful period buildings.

The next day we locked out into the tidal Waddenzee and motored the short distance to the Ijsselmeer lock at Kornwerderzand. It is quite interesting that this barrier was only closed in 1932. Veronica’s Oupa went to South Africa for the first time in 1922, so when he lived Monnickendam, which is 80km inside the barrier, they were still tidal and open to the sea. Of course this exposed them to the storm surges that were so disastrous in that area prior to 1932. Veronica adds: Oupa was also a renowned artist: I now understand his art so much more as a lot of his subject was stormy seas and ship wrecks!
There is also a lot of controversy about the environmental effect that this closing has had on the salinity and hence the flora and fauna. We witnessed the algal bloom issue which the Dutch refer to as ‘pea soup’ as we made our way across the Ijsselmeer.

We spent a night in Makkum and then tried to sail across to Enkhuizen. We spent 2 hours persevering in a 5 to 6 knot breeze that was in the wrong direction for where we were going. It was warm, sunny, tee-shirt weather with a flat sea and many of those magnificent traditional Dutch multi-masters’s ghosting in and out of the mirages that enclosed our world. Eventually we figured it would take us until 4 am the next day to get where we were going, so we plotted a waypoint, let Philemon, the auto pilot, steer the boat and headed for Enkhuizen. Intermittently over the last 2 days we had been getting a battery alarm on the engine, which disappeared at higher revs, now it stayed on until we intervened to silence it.

At Enkhuizen we decided to have some downtime to head into Amsterdam by train and do some more digging for Veronica’s roots in Hoorn. Both Hoorn and Enkhuizen were headquarters of the mighty Dutch East India Company, which apparently was the company that introduced brands to the world. The overlapping VOC symbol was the first brand ever. We saw evidence of how effective branding is, and has been, even 500 years later!
I recall seeing the VOC symbol on many of the buildings in Cape Town, which was established as their refreshment station in 1652 for their trade route to the East. Enkhuizen is the site of the Zuiderzee museum. This is a whole village that has been recreated, very tastefully and realistically, to show how Dutch people lived in the 1800s. We spent about 3 hours wandering around the village, popping into the butcher, baker, chemist, etc. The indoor part of the museum is housed in the old headquarters of the VOC which was another beautiful building, with a facade that is leaning out onto the street, at what appears to be a precariously dangerous angle. This is a characteristic of many of these old buildings, subject to subsidence and settling, yet the Dutch have preserved them and presumably found a way to make them safe at the same time.

We were fortunate that there was a Volvo Penta dealership a block away from where we parked the boat in the Buitehaven. The auto electrician guy came straight away and after we had had just about every mattress out and dug for every battery, we found that the little box that manages the voltage distribution between the 3 battery banks was the problem. Originally we thought it was the regulator. Anyway, after a lot of fault tracing, we got a new box, which required a modified wiring for the regulator sensor wire and this stopped the over charging problem. All this made us slight poorer, in consideration for the parts and labour, but slightly richer in our knowledge of the boat’s systems, in a way that you would never get from studying a manual or a wiring diagram. This essentially ate up the day we were supposed to be using to go to Amsterdam but it did not really matter.

The next day we headed for Hoorn, a short train ride away. Our mission was to seek out the place where Veronica’s Oupa was a minister after he came back from Africa just before in the mid 1930s. We got off the train and saw 3 church steeples and headed for the first, closest, one. It turns out the other 2 churches in Hoorn were converted into apartments anyway. The church was huge and all locked up. After encircling it, and trying many giant imposing doors in vain, we stumbled upon a door that opened, a small back door in an annex. It opened onto a side hall, where we were greeted by a rather hippy-ish guy setting up an art exhibition. It later transpires that he does not have anything to do with the church but he had hired the space to do an exhibition of his Oupa’s art for his family and friends. He had got all of these pieces back from their owners, just for this private exhibition for his family. Anyway, Veronica starts asking questions but other than showing us a book of the churchwardens, he is largely unhelpful and eventually starts getting irritated with us, saying he needs to get on with preparing his exhibition. Then Veronica notices that in a glass cabinet, are some of his Oupa’s exhibits that he had found in a box, including four faded B&W photos. After puzzling for a while, she gets out the iPad and finds a picture of her Oupa’s wedding. When we bring this over to the cabinet there is no doubt the two photos are of the same person. All 5 people that were present, including those getting ready for the exhibition were in no doubt that this is the same person in both pictures. Suddenly the guy that was dismissive 5 minutes before is interested and there is much exchanging of e-mail addresses, which has resorted in further correspondence. The connection has to have been art and the church. The interesting thing was that they had laid out the pictures they had found amongst his Oupa’s possessions but they had no idea who any of the people were. Anyway, my amazement is one on testing probability theory. This was a one off exhibition, it was private, what were the chances of us walking in there on that day and having this conversation?

On Saturday night the German couple that we had met in Vlieland in the storm in June, came over in their boat, with their daughters from Makkum. We had a great fish stew with chorizo and drank far too much wine and had a brilliant evening of conversation about a range of super diverse topics. It was great to see them again and to meet their daughters that are both studying medicine.

On Sunday we set out for Ijmuiden. We had a very light following wind so we put up the Parasailor across the Makermeer and had some great sailing on a pancake flat lake, heading for Amsterdam. Again we realised that we needed to hurry things up a bit so we motored and locked through to the North Sea Canal and ducking and diving the heavy traffic as we made our way through Amsterdam central. We started to run out of light and suction, so we stopped about 12km short of Ijmuiden in a marina at Nauerna. It was not exactly salubrious but it had a restaurant, which did good food, and since the harbour master had Mondays off and there was no automat machine, we had a free night.

The next day it took us about and hour from there to get to the sea lock at the end of the canal. We passed one car carrier in the canal and many big shallow freeboard barges, plying their wares. It was a semi misty, crisp morning with the sun struggling through. In the open sea the mist cleared and again we put up the parasailor in light winds and very comfortably reached, with ease down to Scheveningen, which is the harbour closest to the The Hague. Again it felt like closing a circle, as we had spent 2 nights there in June after sailing hard for a week from Portsmouth. We had hoped to hook up with an old work colleague but muddled e-mails scuppered that plan.

Tuesday was the last sailing day of this 4-month trip and we were blessed with fine winds, although Veronica was not feeling on top of the world, having had a cold for the last few days. We also had super moon spring tides to deal with but again we were blessed as they were in our favour. We crossed the exceptionally busy Europort entrance without having to make any course alterations pondering about how our perceptions about shipping and sailing have changed and matured over the past 4 months. The boat was reaching and touching 10 knots SOG as we sailed to the entrance lock for the non-tidal Haringvliet. At the Haringvliet entrance there was a major road lifting bridge and a lock. We were told we would have to wait half an hour for the lock and there was no waiting pontoon, so we idled in circles, killing time. The controller was clearly not looking at his camera properly as we got a green light for the lock but the bridge did not open. The lock light went red again, we reversed up and then the bells for the bridge started going and lines of trucks stopped and the bridge opened in conjunction with the lock.

From there, the sail up the Haringvliet and Holland’s Diep was a fast, albeit tricky and gusty beat for 25 NM, dodging shallows and pinching on the wind to make it around headlands and islands. We were heading to the boat’s winter home and to the place we had left the car, Strijensas. We had underestimated the distance, well actually what we had underestimated was the waits of the locks and bridges. Lady luck shone on us again as about 7 NM before Strijensas, there was a major highway with an opening bridge. We had failed to notice that only on Fridays it opened at 18h30 and not every other weekday, at this time of the year. You could get an 18h30 opening but you had to request it a few hours in advance. Veronica phoned but they told us to take a hike. However, when we got there, there was another boat waiting and when we sidled up to him, it turned out he had requested a special opening. We motored the last piece and arrived in the dark, which is always interesting in a marina that you have never been to by water before. Despite a gusting wind the Marina was completely sheltered behind trees and, rather fittingly we executed a perfect stern poles mooring, something that 4 months ago, we would have been psyched out by.

It took us a full day and a half to get the sails off, all the loose deck equipment off and remove the sail cover and dodger, which have been sent off for cleaning, TLC and re-impregnation. The boat was lifted yesterday and we said our sad good byes. Winter lifting and storage in Holland is about 1/3 the price it would be in the Solent. It will be sad not to have the boat to sail in the winter but absence makes the heart grow fonder. Next season we will sail the boat to the Mediterranean and the only thing that might scupper that is if I find a job that gets in the way.

I have updated the gallery so check it out.

The trip has taught us a lot and given us a lot of confidence in the boat, taught us that we can sail this boat shorthanded without slitting each others’ throats. I would also just like to say thanks to all that came and shared parts of this Baltic Odyssey with us and thank you mostly to my first mate, for being a rock. A lot of my friends say I am lucky to have a first mate like this; most other women would not deal with it (or maybe just with me, en general). I know this and appreciate it.

Veronica has promised to put some statistics and facts together for this trip and that will probably be our last post for a while. Cheers and thanks for reading this.