Across the German Bight
As we sat there eating, several more yachts pottered along the cut to moor up, and late in the evening a strange little kayak paddled up. She was built of plywood, and a little Polish ensign flew proudly at her stern. Later I chatted to her skipper. He had paddled from Poland, and not just the short way along the coast – he had crossed the 50 miles from the mainland to the offshore Danish island of Bornholm, and from there made his way via the Swedish coast and Danish islands! He told me he taught philosophy at university, but he much preferred paddling. The boat had been built for him by a friend. His previous boat had been plastic, but plywood was much better – the plastic one had begun to melt under him off the coast of Ghana on one trip, a most uncomfortable experience.
And his plans for the future? He was working up to an Atlantic crossing, Africa to Brazil. Easy to take enough food, the problem was water - about two hours a day hard labour was needed with a little reverse osmosis pump to make enough, and on top of that he would do about eight hours paddling.
I was told often enough that I was as mad as a box of frogs to sail a little engineless boat around the place. It was pleasantly reassuring to find someone even crazier than me.
Martin had rung to let me know that he had arrived at Lubeck airport, and was making his way out to find me. I hadn’t appreciated quite how out in the sticks we were now, for although this might be a busy place for boats, by land it was several miles from the nearest small village down a narrow single track road. It didn’t help that he missed a train he needed as well, but he did finally arrive in a taxi a few hourse after dark.
I had no chart of the Eider river until we got to the lower tidal reaches, although a map I had glanced at earlier had shown it twisting sinously through low-lying countryside for about 50 miles before it opened out into a muddy estuary. The lock through to the river opened at 8, and we paddled straight in and paid our lock dues. The stagings about us were emptying as all the yachts headed back to the main canal, and it looked like we would be the only people going by the alternative route.
We weren't quite alone – a German yacht with 3 middle-aged blokes aboard came in behind us at the last minute. They offered us a tow a little way down river. I hesitated, for I much prefer to make my own way when I can. But the river was narrow enough to make it almost impossible to tack down, and a strong headwind was blowing. Given the distance we had to go I decided we would accept. It was a shame to have to do so, but it probably saved us several days of very hard work. For the next few hours we made good progress following them at a ropes length between the reedy banks.
The river wound along, in no hurry to reach the sea as we followed its sweeping loops north and south. Our passage was interrupted by a couple more locks and a lifting bridge, where we had to moor up until the operator had finished his lunch and could come along to let us through. We took a bottle of wine along to the Germans, who had tied up a couple of boatlengths away, and they responded by inviting us to join their lunch. Clearly, asking for tows is a passport to free meals.
In Suderstapel, about halfway to the sea, the river widened out and the banks became a bit more open, so we decided that we could start making our own way. The Germans had stopped anyway to go for a swim, and after looking round the pretty village and eating ice-creams we jumped in too to cool off, for it was a sweltering day.
Oddly, when we set off we discovered the current was against us, flowing upriver. I guess this happens near high tide, when the water flows over the last lock - although it was still well downstream off us. The adverse current made it hard to round the first bend in the river, which was to windward, but once we had scraped round we had the wind free for a while. It was a delightful sail in the sun and light winds – far more enjoyable than being towed, though admittedly far slower. In places where the banks were tree-lined little wind reached the river, and the breaths that did get through were flukey and inconsistent (and frequently from dead ahead), so at times we took to the oars. We ran aground several times on shallow mudbanks, and where pushing off with the pole and oars failed, one of us would just jump out and push us off, clambouring back on board as as we came free.
By nightfall we had covered most of the remaining miles to the final lock. We anchored under a tree-lined bank for the night. Looking at the scanty information we had available, we reckoned the tide would be ebbing beneath the lock from early in the morning, so we awoke at 6 to make the most of the favourable current. However, sticking my head out the hatch in the cold half-light I discovered thick fog and a flat calm, and so I withdrew my head and announced another 2 hours sleep. But although the mist was beginning to lift at 8, there was still not the slightest hint of wind. We set off under oars anyway, and rowed all the way to the lock, a little over an hour away.
Below the lock the river changed character. Above, it was sleepy and slow-moving, with low banks bordered by trees and fields; below, the strong tidal currents swept busily and purposefully back and forth, churning up sediment and exposing salt marsh, reed banks, and great thick banks of brown mud as they drained away to the sea. Fishing stakes and nets were everywhere, tended by men in little clinker dinghies. There were a few Eider ducks too, though not enough to make a duvet from. Perhaps a pillow.
The tide was running fast as we left, and swept us rapidly downstream. There was still little wind, and though we kept the sails up they didn’t help much. Most of the time one of us pulled at the oars to give us steerage way, but the tide did most of the work of getting us down the river.
Another swing bridge lay across our track and as we swept down towards it we realised we weren’t sure how to contact anyone to get it to open. We turned round to stem the tide, but it was pushing us out far faster than we could sail into it, so before we were swept into the bridge we put the anchor over to stop us. We had been given a little leaflet at Gieselau with information about the river, and there were a couple of phone numbers in there, but I got no reply when I tried to ring them.
We had been there for about 10 minutes, debating whether we should get the canoe out and find someone ashore who would know what to do, when we noticed it had silently started to swing open of its own accord anyway. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, but perhaps there was a camera and it was remotely operated.
The tide had taken us most of the way to Tonning, where the river widens out into a shallow estuary, when we ran aground again on a mudbank. It took both of us standing chest deep in the water to push Teal off, and as we finally slid free and jumped back aboard, we noticed that the tide was rapidly slackening.
Very soon it was flooding fast and we were being swept back up the river. Seeing as I was wet anyway I got Martin to steer close into the muddy bank, where I leapt off with a rope and tried to pull us along from the shore. Squelching in my wellies through the thick mud was hard work, and slow, so we soon gave up and anchored to wait out the flood.
We put the canoe together and paddled ashore, for Tonning was within walking distance and with the North Sea rapidly approaching I was anxious to get an up-to-date weather forecast. It was again a sweltering day, and we had a hot and thirsty trudge across a field of cows and thistles and for several miles along the high sea wall. Tonning was quiet and picturesque. It must have been an important stopping place when this was the main route to the Baltic. Now it's a forgotten little backwater, and perhaps better off for that.
We found an internet cafe and looked up the forecast. It wasn’t great – the next day or two would be fine, wind no stronger than force 5, but out in the Atlantic a deep depression was brewing and it would soon be swinging gales across the North Sea. My intention had been to stand a long leg south and west past the German Freisian islands to Norderney, perhaps stopping at the little offshore island of Heligoland on the way, but there was no way I wanted to risk being out in the North Sea in a gale again, especially near these treacherous shores.
One option was just to sail to Heligoland and hole up there until the gales passed; but that could be a few days. Heligoland is an interesting place - cars are banned, the rocky cliffs are entirely at odds with the muddy shores of the German Bight, and it was a British possession for most of the 19th Century until we swopped it for Zanzibar - but it is very small, and I suspect we would very soon have sampled all its delights. Besides, Martin was only with me for a week, and getting home from a remote island might not have been easy. I didn’t have anyone lined up to come out after him, and the prospect of sailing single-handed from Heligoland wasn’t appealing either. The other option was to get a little further south along the coast itself before the gales arrived. At Wilhelmshaven there was a canal that led parallel to the coast for 40 miles, to Emden. It might be possible to continue along the canal despite the gales offshore.
We had pulled the canoe high up onto the salt marsh when we left it, thinking we would only be a couple of hours at most and that the tide wouldn’t be more than half way in by the time we got back. We must have been a little longer than we expected, for when we got back the canoe was floating and we had to wade out to it! Luckily I had jammed a paddle into the mud and tied the painter to it, otherwise it would have drifted away.
Not long after we got back the tide slackened and turned again. Given the forecast, I was for setting off at once, and doing a night sail down the coast. So up anchor, down through the last bridge in a rising wind, and soon we were rushing past Tonning again, having got there far faster under sail than on foot. Here the estuary began to widen, with great drying sandbanks on either side of the deep water channel. We had one final obstacle before we were truly in the North Sea, for a great tidal barrage had been built across the estuary a few miles further down, designed to prevent the low lying land being flooded by storm surges. We followed the buoys that marked the channel as they led round towards it, being pushed by a tide that was now running at three or four knots, and beating into a short choppy sea. On the north side of the sluices where the water churned and boiled out through the barrier was a sea lock. It had a thoroughly terrifying approach for a small boat, for the channel had swept round to the south of the estuary and we had to cross in front of the sluices sufficiently far above to be sure of not being sluiced out ourselves and mashed to pieces in the maelstrom, but not so far above that we ran aground on the sandbanks. For once I was glad of the stiff wind, for as it approached the sluices the current increased to five or six knots and we needed the speed to get across it.
We made it into the upstream basin without incident though, and tied up to the harbour wall behind a couple of fishing boats. The wall towered 12 feet above us, green and slimy with seaweed. Ah, the joys of being in tidal waters once again. I climbed up to the control tower that overlooked the sluices and the lock to see if there were any charges to pay or any formalities to go through before we went through the lock.
The evening was drawing on, the light was failing and about half the ebb tide had now run. The wind was now about force 5, onshore, giving a pretty rough slop where it met the fast-running tide. Although I was keen to get as far south as possible before the gales arrived, I had to admit that looking out to sea the prospect of a night sail was not appealing.
The man in the control tower looked askance at me when I said we wanted to go straight through. ‘Have you got a recent chart?’ he asked. ‘The sandbanks have changed quite a lot in the last few years’. I was using a chart from the Hatfield Peverel stack, so I had to admit that it wasn’t the most recent. We looked at his chart – and I was stunned. The channels and sandbanks had undergone massive changes. In fact, the main channel that was marked on my chart had completely silted up, and another channel had deepened and the navigation buoys had been transferred to that route – a full mile to the south of the original channel. The new route out wasn’t as deep as the original route either. Where my chart showed a full 2m of water at low water, the new route shallowed to as little as 0.9m, not enough to take Teal over when the tide was nearly out.
Given that the tide was now mostly out, and my chart completely useless, it was clear that carrying on would be pretty daft. So we stayed in the harbour, and set our alarms for 5 the following morning, when the tide would just be beginning to ebb but there would still be plenty of depth over the shallows. I took another look at our chart for I was curious to see what date it bore – I hadn’t checked before. It turned out to be printed in 1979 - it was far older than any of our other charts.
As a cold misty dawn broke we radioed the control tower and rowed through into the lock. The wind had died considerably overnight, and as the light grew the route out looked rather less frightening. But the tide was rapidly gaining strength and as we popped out the lock the current caught us and the tidal barrier rapidly receeded.
The channel out was in fact very easy to follow, marked clearly on both sides with buoys at frequent intervals. At first the mist made it a little hard to see more than one buoy ahead, but as it cleared the navigation became easier. It was 16 miles to the safe water mark that marked the end of the sandbanks, but the strong tide swept us out in no time.
Once out we turned our head south. The low lying land faded into a grey horizon and disappeared, so we had only the wide sea and the sky for company, plus the occasional fishing boat. I left Martin on deck for a while and caught up on sleep.
A few hours later a steady stream of shipping could be seen crossing our path ahead. This was the shipping channel up the Elbe, busy with shipping for Cuxhaven and Hamburg - and the Baltic, for had we continued down the Kiel canal we would have met the Elbe at Brunsbuttel. As we crossed the tide turned again, and we had to go hard on the wind for a while to avoid being set onto the Scharhorn Riff sandbanks.
It must have been nearly 6 hours later that we found ourselves off the wide Jade estuary. It was unfortunate timing, for it meant the tide was turning again, and we would have another 6 hours of foul stream now that we did want to change course and go in towards the land. It would have been nice to find somewhere to anchor and wait out the foul tide, but there was nowhere that was sufficiently sheltered.
Low dunes were emerging from the sea on our starboard bow, and beyond them lay the mainland. We sailed past the channel that led into the shallow behind the islands with regret. I would have loved to take the route inshore of the islands, bumping over the watersheds at high tide as Carruthers had done in Dulcibella. But Teal's draft is just a little too much for those shallow waters. I dare say we could have got across on a decent spring tide, but it would have been a close run thing, and not terribly sensible in the gales that were forecast for the next couple of days.
The wind was veering to the north however, and despite the fierce ebb we were still making way against the land. The sky darkened and under the heavy clouds it built up to a good force 6, and as the estuary narrowed and the tidal streams also strengthened, the contrary wind whipped up a most unpleasant sea. We had a roller-coaster ride in, but without that wind we would have gone nowhere, for the streams reached 3 or 4 knots in places.
The Jade is not a pretty estuary, disfigured by large oil refineries that took an age to pass. Eventually however the streams began to slacken, and we reached slightly more sheltered waters and started to make better progress. We were fast approaching Wilhelmshaven, but could get no response on the radio when we tried to ask for permission to enter the port. It is a big naval station and entry is restricted. On the pierheads red lights indicated that we weren’t allowed in, so as there was a sheltered little anchorage a mile further on we carried on and very thankfully lobbed the anchor over. It had been a long day.
We still couldn’t raise the port on the radio in the morning, but as we sailed towards the entrance a police boat came out and spoke to us. A pompous uniformed chap reprimanded us for sailing down the wrong side of the estuary - though we were out of the buoyed channel and well within our rights, and in any case had no option – in the light winds if we had crossed to the far side the strong ebbing tide would have swept us straight past the pierheads. I don’t think he understood the limitations of sailing. He did however give us permission to enter, although the lock into the inner harbour would not open until midday. We tacked in slowly past the naval ships and tied up on a slimy seaweedy wall by the lock to wait. It was well after midday when the vast lock finally swung open.
Above the lock a huge complex of basins opened into one another. Presumably this had all once been part of the great naval dockyard. Now some parts were given over to commercial shipyards, but much was run down and derelict. A friendly yacht towed us from the lock to the swing bridge above the second basin, then cast off and waved goodbye, for their moorings were just below the bridge. We took to the oars for the last couple of hundred yards or so to berth at a yacht club - a struggle in the stiff wind.