Monday 19 June
Tuesday 20 June
Wednesday 21 June
Thursday 22 June
Friday 23 June
Saturday 24 June
Sunday 25 June
Dordrecht
Dordrecht to Zierikzee
Zierikzee
Zierikzee to Bastiaan da Langplaat (Veerse Meer)
Veerse Meer to Breskens via Middelburg, Vlissingen
Breskens to Nieuwpoort
Nieuwpoort to Ramsgate
returns to top of this page
We can see and hear the Grote Kerk from Starry Night. It has a wonderful clarion which plays a tune on the hour, and the half hour. It is one of the best we have heard. The chimes are also quite impressive. As well as on the hour, it chimes the half hour with the full count for the next hour.(eg 5:30 is chimed with six gongs - the Dutch say half before six). We haven't worked out how to tell the difference between the half hour and whole hour just by listening. Thankfully the clarion is turned off at night, but light sleepers should beware of the clock chimes, which keep on going 24/24.
This morning we were treated to a short sharp thunderstorm before the day started to warm up. Gill and Maureen went out to do some shopping, though they soon found out that most of the shops were not open on Monday until 12:00, and some not until Wednesday! Alan packed. Mike did some routine maintenance. We then had lunch in the centre of town before heading down to the station to see Alan and Gill onto their train for the Hook of Holland. With luck they should be home before midnight.
More shopping this afternoon, with some further provisions for the week to come, as well as some browsing. Mike has been sorting out the charts and routes for the return passages. We have two independent GPS systems. One drives the autopilot and the repeater at the upper helm with the rolling road etc. The other is built into a Navman Tracker (mini plotter) which we have up top as a second check on where we are against the paper charts; it can also be switched over to drive the autopilot if the main GPS fails. The waypoints for the homebound routes needed to be transfered from the lap top to the plotter, and to the GPS.
Tomorrow we start to wend our way back to Vlissingen, stopping off at some of the old Zealand fishing ports we missed on the way up. We will be keeping an eye on the weather forecast as there are yet more gales on the way. Hopefully they will have passed us by before our planned passage to Nieuwpoort on Sunday, or we will have to delay departure.
View from Starry Night (Nieuwe Haven)
Lange IJzerenbrug (Long Ironbridge)
Byeeee...!
We then found out from the harbour master that all the bridges were out of action in Dordrecht, due to a malfunction somewhere in the central command system. Apparently the commercial barge operators were making a big fuss, as you might expect. The HM promised to let us know when the bridge would open. At 09:00, with no warning, the bridge started to open - someone had changed the fuse! There was a mad scramble by another boat as well as us to get going - everything was basically ready - and we cast off in a great hurry (never a good idea). We knew that they wouldn't leave the bridge open for long and it was a 30 minute wait for the next opening.
As we emerged into the Oude Mass we were confronted with more commercial traffic than usual, with barges emerging from various havens where they had been penned in for the last hour! We picked our way across the main channel to "our side of the road" and headed South. For the next six hours we retraced our earlier steps from May. Luck was with us on both locks and neither took more than 15 minutes. By 15:00 we were passing under the massive Zeelandbrug into the Roompot aiming for the harbour entrance canal leading to Zierikzee. The water was now quite choppy due to a strong wind over tide in a wide area of water. Salt spray was blowing onto the top windscreen, and the front half of the boat was covered in wet sticky salt deposits.
The entrance canal is almost immediately after the bridge, and then it's a mile to the Nieuwe Haven where the HM appeared in an orange inflatable to herd the incomings. He pulled up alongside to ask us how long we wanted to stay for, how long is the boat, how wide, etc. He then lead us to the place he wanted us to moor, which was to raft up alongside a Dutch registered Aqua-Star. Once all formalities were taken care of we went into town and had a well deserved coffee and appelgebak.
Zierikzee is well worth the visit. It is a small town and has lots of lovely side streets in a very traditional style, plenty of small shops, bars and cafes, and interesting boaty bits, and a lot of charm and character. It is described in the Rough Guide as one of the top three prettiest places in Zeeland.
Nieuwe Haven, Zierikzee
Zierikzee market square
Imposing and stylish merchant houses
The chap we were rafted up against was the only one we have seen to go out today. He didn't think that it was a problem for him! It meant that we had to manoeuvre out into the canal, while he extricated himself and then get back into the hole he had left between the rafts of boats, all with a strong cross wind. At least it meant that we were now on the inside and could come and go without disturbing anyone.
In the morning it rained and blew so we stayed in and rested. In the afternoon it just blew, so we went for another wander round town and decided on a restaurant for the evening. When we came back we had a boat rafted onto us. The skipper said that it had been very windy and rough out on the water. Luckily he wants to go before us tomorrow morning.
This evening it is blowing even harder, and we are under clear blue skies. What will tomorrow bring? Hopefully the answer will be on VHF23 at 23:05 this evening!
The old harbour
The 16th century watergate and bridge
Last night we dined at a fish restaurant in Zierikzee. The special was devil fish with zeekraal. The waitress didn't speak much English and could only tell us that zeekraal was "a vegetable from the sea". Despite Maureen's normal adventurous leanings in the food department, she decided she would not risk €20 on something with such a vague description, and opted for Slibtongs (a small grilled sole and very nice too). We established afterwards that devil fish is monk fish, but zeekraal remains a mystery. postscript: a reader of this page has kindly informed me that zeekraal is in fact samphire - that would have made a nice meal!
The forecast for our area (Zierikzee gets its own mention) this morning gave us hope. Force 4 to 5, occasionally 6 at first, from the South West, easing to force 2 to 3 in about 18 hours time. We decided to wait till lunch time to leave and see what others were doing. By 10:30 quite a few boats had gone (some smaller than us) and others were coming in so we decided to leave about 11:00.
As we progressed up the canal leading to the Oosterschelde we could feel the wind getting stronger. We needed to head directly across to the other side more or less into the face of the wind which would suit us fine. Then in the shelter of the West shore of the Oosterschelde, the plan was to hug the shoreline round to the lock into the Veerse Meer where the water would be less agitated.
Once out into the Oosterschelde, we realised that the wind was more from the West and so we had some pretty big waves from the starboard side and not head on, which is not so good. Starry Night took the punishment well, and in any case we had stowed things inside expecting rough water. Spray came over the top helm windscreen and soaked us once or twice, and we had a good helping of water over the back deck from the side on one occasion.
There were patches of calmer water and rougher water caused by the tide, the shallows and the wind, so we turned into the wind for the rough bits and regained our preferred direction in the less rough bits. Within twenty minutes we were in the shelter of the opposite shore and after that it was just the wind which attacked us.
Again, we managed to catch the lock perfectly, and were the last boat in. Because the tide was well up in the Oosterschelde, there was about a 1.5 metre drop into the Verse Meer, where it was much more peaceful. We found a nice sheltered mooring out of the wind and the waves quite near to where we moored back in May. We found that everything from stem to stern was covered in thick salty deposits and it took some time to wash the worst of it off the superstructure. You can't use the lake water because that is salty too, so its a case of filling buckets in the sink.
Since 17:00 we have had clear blue skies and the wind has dropped slightly. Hopefully by tomorrow normality will have been restored, whatever that is.
Heading out of Zierikzee
Our mooring on the Veerse Meer
This morning we were treated to a beautiful calm lakeland scene; what a difference from yesterday. We gently motored on towards Veere, regretting that the windy conditions earlier had prevented us from stopping off there, because we had had to spend an extra day cowering in Zierikzee.
We were quickly through the lock at Veere with its lumpy stone walls and surprising breadth after you enter through its narrow gates. At Middelburg we fueled up for the sea passage, taking on 113 litres at what now seemed like a bargain price of €1.04 per litre. Then we moved onto the "shopping pontoon" just opposite the harbour master's office for a quick visit into town for some last minute Dutch goodies as well as a few staples. We couldn't resist one last appelgebak and coffee in the market square.
It was two-ish when we cast off and rejoined the canal down to Vlissingen. This stretch has five opening bridges. The Wateralmanak has a complicated explanation of when the bridges will open, which takes up a page of Dutch, with all sorts of exceptions which we couldn't figure out. In any case the first bridge didn't open when we thought it should so we must have got it all wrong! After half an hour of doodling in the canal waiting, the bridge finally opened. By this time there were five boats in convoy and we had a clear run through the other bridges all the way to the lock in Vlissingen. At one bridge we were all hollered at over a speaker by bridge control - something about through traffic. Whatever it was it galvanised all the Dutch boats into action, and the cruising speed was doubled and much wash was created. We decided that we had been told to hurry up if we wanted to catch the next lock out.
The Westerschelde was very calm with a slight swell and just the wake of passing ships. But there was a ferocious ebb tide running at three knots with some impressive eddies and overfalls near jetties and so on. Luckily Breskens is just the other side of the estuary so the current had no real effect apart from influencing our heading. At the final approach to the harbour we were battling into the stream making just 3.5 knots headway. Rounding the harbour jetty with its turbulent water without being swept into it was the main challenge, and then we were into the shelter of the Marina.
Our plan is to leave Holland a day earlier than originally scheduled to take advantage of the current weather conditions which are favourable for our enterprise. Its up at 05:00 tomorrow!
Cloud reflections - Veerse Meer
Hardly a breath of wind
The sea was calm with just a slight swell and a delight to cruise. There was hardly any wind for the first three of four hours though a gentle breeze did emerge, bringing with it masses of weekend sailors. By the time we reached the entrance to Nieuwpoort harbour complex, the sailing boats were pouring out like bats out of a cave.
We were assigned a berth by the "secretariat" of the VVW marina in the absence of the HM who was elsewhere at the time. This berth turned out to be in amongst masses of sailing boats in a part of the marina that was a bit too small for Starry Night. We are the only motor boat in his part. When we eventually caught up with the HM he told us that we should not have been put there and apologised. It was easy enough getting in because a lot of our neighbours were already out. Now they are back we will have a nice challenge in the early pearly to avoid marring any plastic with dutch steel! Hopefully they will all be in their beds/bunks fast asleep.
We walked into Nieuwpoort town which was quite a hike in the mid day sun - about 25 minutes through a semi industrial/dockland land scape a lot of the way. But the town itself was worth the effort, quite pleasant with a market square and an old church (complete with wedding). We had a nice meal in a restaurant on the square, and came back to the boat mid afternoon to relax before tomorrow's crossing.
Westerschelde - 05.30 am
VVW Marina Nieuwpoort - we are there! (somewhere)
Lunchtime venue, in Nieuwpoort
We still managed to drag ourselves out of the pit at 05:00 (am for the doubters) and were on our way by 05:45. It was a bit tricky getting out because the gap down between the rows of boats was less than our overall length. It required quite a bit of jiggling and some early morning use of the bow thruster (which I normally avoid with its associated droning) to get out of our berth. I hope we didn't wake any Hyundai party goers who obviously needed a good long lie in to recover.
Once on our way we were treated to a glorious sun-rise and a mill pond like sea. The smooth sea lasted all the way across the channel and it was only when we got near to the Goodwin Sands that the North East wind started to blow and the sea woke up a bit.We arrived in Ramsgate harbour around 13:30, and topped up with yet another 100 litres of diesel before finding a space on the visitors' pontoon alongside a Dutch sailing boat. (so we would feel "at home").
Mike found out, when he went to pay, that next week-end is the Ramsgate power boat race weekend; the centre of Ramsgate is shut down for spectators, and presumably there is no space in the marina to fit a jelly fish. So the lesson of the last 24 hours is that if you want to maximise your chances of a hassle free existence you must check ahead where you plan to stop. Neither Nieuwpoort VVW nor Ramsgate will take bookings for individual boats so this tends to encourage you to roll up on the day (which is what they say you should do). But it is probably worth a phone call first.
Tomorrow the winds return (weather variety) and so we will be holed up in Ramsgate. A trip to Canterbury is being contemplated.
Nieuwpoort - sunrise
Nieuwpoort harbour entrance
East Goodwin Light Ship
Copyright © 2006-2009 Mike Hawkridge