Sailing through the Netherlands

Johanna

N 51° 35.564', E 3° 43.165'

A long time ago (a month or so) we were looking at the chart of the coast of North Sea. We then thought that if the weather is good, it's not very long way. Back then we were wondering if we'll stop in the Netherlands at all. Now we have been here for more than two weeks.

The weather has not been what we wanted. Strong winds from the wrong direction.

So we took the inland route. Here is this wonderful Standing mast route that you can take through the country.

Here we are in the first lock entering the inland sea "Ijssel meer". We have had about half a dozen locks after this one.

Sailing to Amsterdam was nice and easy over the two inland seas.

Amsterdam was busy on the canal.

We enjoyed the city for a couple of days at then it was time to move on. We made plans to go through the city. The only time you can do it is in the middle of the night. After all the trains have stopped for the night they open the railway bridge right next to the Central railway station.

Here in the country of canals and bridges you can not make too precise plans with too tight schedules. The railway bridge was broken. Luckily there's an other route down south. So we took a detour through the city of Haarlem. It only costed as about 15 more miles. but we didn't see Amsterdam by night. We are not sorry about that because we didn't have to stay up all night and we saw other wonderful things. 

The city of Haarlem had 8 bridges that opened for us. Here we have passed one of them.

There were a few of these funny lifting bridges on the way. So you do have a limit of how high your mast can be (about 20 meters).

Even though we have passed about 30 opening bridges we haven't disturbed any freeway traffic. They all go in the tunnels under the canals.

What a great country for kids when you can have your own water slide in the back yard.

The weather has been quite cold and rainy. We should be getting south pretty soon...

We have now traveled about 150 miles through the Netherlands. We have nothing but good things to say about the Dutch people and marinas. Everybody has been very nice and helpful to us and the facilities in the marinas have been very good.

Now we are in Roompot and there's only 1.5 miles to the lock that separates us from the North sea. When the wind changes so that we don't have to tack we'll continue our way.