Holland
And so to Delfzyl. ‘An uninteresting little seaport’ is how Knight dismisses the town.. In the evening I spent an hour or so wandering round, wondering at the lack of shops or indeed anything of interest (apart from a very large and grand church) until I realised I had completely bypassed the centre of town which lay in the opposite direction to the one I expected. It was slumbering when I did reach it, all the shops were shut and there were very few souls around. Knight was perhaps a little harsh however, for few seaports are uninteresting.
I took a look at the canal I was planning to head through on the morrow, for I didn’t really fancy tackling the North Sea or the strong tidal streams and drying flats of the Fresian islands while I was single handed, and so, like Knight, I thought I would make the most of the extensive Dutch inland waterways. There is a recommended ‘standing mast’ route through the waterways that avoids fixed bridges and is navigable for yachts, and the wide, straight canal that leads up to Groningen from Delfzyl is the first section.
The canal is far from a scenic forgotten backwater like the Ems-Jade canal though, being an extremely busy route for the enormous barges that churn non-stop up and down the country. Sadly the authorities in their wisdom don’t permit sailing on the busy canals any longer, and nor do they maintain decent towpaths. Like Knight, I would be begging a tow along here – but at least there should be quite a number of yachts passing through so I should have far more chance of a tow than I had in Germany.
After breakfast I lazily paddled round from the marina to the waiting stage outside the sea lock, hung the begging sign I had made for the Kiel canal in the rigging, and sat down with a good book. Although it was hot and sunny, there was a strong headwind that would have made it impossible to sail through the canal even if that had been allowed.
Every few minutes as I waited a titan emerged from the big lock built for the barges, most so deeply laden that water washed over their decks. Watching the barges entering from the sea was even more impressive as they slid into the narrow gap at a phemonenal rate with barely inches to spare on either side.
The little lock for pleasure boats didn’t get much use though. After about an hour a couple of motor boats passed through, but neither offered me a tow. Another hour, and a pair of yachts went in – one did offer me a tow, but he was only going a couple of miles up the canal, where I thought there would be even less chance of a tow than from where I was now, so I thanked them but declined. It was 3pm before a big, powerful motor cruiser stopped for me, and towed me into the lock - rather too fast, for he didn’t seem to appreciate that although he could put his engine into reverse to stop, I had no means of braking other than steering into the lock wall and desperately grabbing anything to hand to slow down before I skewered him with the bowsprit.
The next couple of hours were probably the least enjoyable of the entire trip. Even getting out of the lock was trying. The man in the cruiser throttled up and we shot forward – but until we were moving I had no steerage way, and we banged into the lock wall and snagged a fender on a ladder, straining badly the stay to which it was attached. Luckily at that point the tension pulled the tow rope from the samson post, otherwise the damage might have been a lot worse.
The man insisted I take a thicker line of his to tow with, although I was more than happy with my thinner one, which at least would have broken in an emergency. Then the powerful diesels revved up again, and we sped off.
A deep-draughted boat of 20’ waterline length is not designed to go at 7 or 8 knots, and Teal was not happy to be treated like this. She put as much strain on the tow rope as she was able, and threw up an enormous angry wake behind her. The canoe, which I was towing behind, protested even more, and very nearly sank before I managed to heave the bows out of the water and hook the painter onto a cleat on the mizzen mast – using only one hand for I had to keep steering all the while. Because the tow line was attached to the samson post on Teals foredeck I had to steer slightly to starboard so that the line lead away to port and didn’t snag on the forestay, but not so much that it fouled the bowsprit shroud. At that speed it took a lot of care, and it didn’t help that the well-meaning man on the motor cruiser seemed to enjoy steering as close to the right-hand bank as he was able without realising that it put me in serious danger of running aground.
There were a couple of lifting bridges on the route, which the cruiser charged at full speed, before reluctantly accepting they weren’t going to open in time and stopping dead, leaving me to sheer wildly off to the side to avoid ramming him. After the first of these I kept an oar to hand so I could use it as a brake, but it didn’t have quite the same stopping power as two 200 hp turbocharged diesels. I became very nervous whenever I saw another bridge looming ahead in the distance.
At least at the speed we were going it was only a couple of hours to Groningen. The cruiser was thankfully heading down another canal here, but took me beyond the end of the commercial harbour before he cast off. ‘Maybe you should get a little outboard engine’ he shouted as I waved my trembling thanks and got the oars ready.
I just smiled, and refrained from telling him that I thought the world would be a far happier place if he and all his kind went back to sails and horses. I found I was trembling with the release of nervous tension, for the last couple of hours had demanded total concentration and it would have been easy for a lot of damage to be done. I slowly rowed the last few hundred yards into the town.
Beyond the last swing bridge, the character of the canal changed utterly, and the centre of Groningen was delightful. The commercial traffic went by another route from here, and the old canal wound serenely in a loop through the town under no less than 8 lifting bridges.
Just before the first bridge sturdy wooden staging had been set up in an old dock basin, and here I tied up in the company of 9 or 10 other yachts and a few permanent houseboats. I imagine this was the same basin that the Falcon had tied up in.
In the main square a stage had been set up and a Verdi opera was being performed. Quite a number of people had paid for seats in the enclosure that had been erected around the stage, but there must have been an equal number outside just enjoying the sound or peering through the gaps in the fencing, and I joined them for a while.
I shaved for the first time in a few weeks in the morning, and hardly recognized myself in the mirror. I normally keep my hair very short, but it was pretty wild and shaggy by this point, and it was bleached to an astonishing degree by the sun and sea. When I got back several people asked me if I had had it dyed. My skin too was deeply tanned – having been in the southern hemisphere between the two sailing seasons I was in effect just reaching the end of an 18-month long summer, and had spent most of it outdoors.
I handed the key for the toilets back to the harbour master, and asked him about the route on from here. ‘Ah, you’d better be quick’ he said. ‘The bridges in the town only open twice a day, for a convoy of boats to go through – the first bridge normally opens at 9’. It was 2 minutes to, so I ran back to Teal and cast off. A little green German yacht in the dock was also getting underway, and I could make out the spectres of two more hovering in the fog by the bridge. Seeing me rowing up, one of them offered to tow me through, and I was glad to accept for rowing the whole way through the town would have been slow, and I would certainly have held the other boats up.
Beyond the last bridge a headwind was still blowing, but the German yacht, Luna, was happy to keep me in tow so I was able to keep going. It was a far more pleasant ride than the previous day, the canal winding through quiet countryside bordered by rushes and fields. We weren’t hurrying, and Teal gurgled along happily in the wake of Luna. The odd small barge chugged by, but none of the hurrying leviathans used this little winding canal anymore.
Where the channel broadened into the wide Lauersmeer I cast off, for here the channel should be wide enough to tack. It was – just, for although it appeared that the water spread away on either side, it turned out that the channel of sufficiently deep water to sail in was considerably narrower. After a few successful tacks I got too cocky, left a tack too late and ran aground on a sticky mudbank. Pushing with the pole got me nowhere, and neither did getting into the water and pushing. A German yacht was tied to a staging only a couple of boatlengths behind, and the elderly chap on board took a line and tried to pull me off. I hadn’t been going fast when I stuck, but it was jolly grippy stuff that mud, for he couldn’t get me off either. But a big Dutch yacht with chunky leeboards for sailing in these shallow waters - and an even more chunky diesel so that she didn’t have to - came steaming by, and she did have the power to get me off.
The channel did widen out after that, and the wind veered so that I no longer had to tack in any case. The meer reminded me very much of the Norfolk Broads, partly because of the shallow mud, but more for the reeds swaying in the wind, the little backwaters and channels that led off the main channel, and for the sheer number of boats that were out there enjoying it.
After a couple of miles I branched off into the channel leading towards Dokkum, still a few miles away. At least I thought it was probably the channel towards Dokkum – I was navigating with a book that I had been lent by Andy Challis, but the charts were not very detailed and it wasn’t always clear at junctions which way to go.
The channel narrowed, and soon se were sailing along a canal again. At the first lock I took down sails, rowed into the lock and was relieved to find on the far side a signpost to Dokkum. A gentle wind continued to blow from behind and so I kept going until dark, sliding happily by the reeds with a beer in my hand as the sun went down.
For three more days I meandered slowly through the canals. Quiet canals, busy canals; wide canals, narrow canels; lifting bridges, swinging bridges, tall fixed bridges soaring above the mast; the wind with me, against me, and abandoning me altogether. I sailed, rowed, towed, and sat around reading when all means of progression failed. By the end of the first day from Dokkum I had reached Leewaurden, a pretty town encircled by water, with lots of little shops and street cafes. By the second I was in the wide open lake of Sneekermere, where a couple of schuyts crossing tacks made a pretty picture. I moored on a island where a number of other yachts were parked, and was told this was the quiet season - a couple of weeks earlier had been the annual gathering for Sneek week; boats would have been moored 6 deep on the bank I was tied to and the mere the scene of highly competive racing between the different classes of traditional boat.
August was gone now; September had crept upon us, and with it the beginnings of autumn. There was an damp and earthy smell about the island in the grey morning, and the odd leaf was even now falling from the trees. I left quietly under oars, heading for the coast, and by the end of the day was tied up in Lemmer.