Denmark to the Netherlands

August 16, 2021

Denmark to the Netherlands

A container ship passing in front of our bow just north of Germany. This one was rather close, around 300 meters, but we watched them closely on AIS, we can only assume they were watching us, we both maintained our courses, and they passed safely by. It helps that it was daylight. At nighttime I like to keep a nautical mile distance, but that's impossible in busy shipping channels.

A fast sail from Denmark to Germany

After our LegoLand extravaganza, we pointed our bow south to Germany and the entrance to the Kiel Canal. From Korsor to Kiel it was approximately 65 nautical miles, about a 10-12 hour sail. We didn’t rush off in the morning because the winds weren’t forecast to build until around lunchtime, but build they did. We had a fantastic sail with the winds just aft of the beam and between 15-20 knots. Ideal sailing conditions for Positive Waves. We flew the code zero for awhile until the winds reached around 18 knots then we sailed under reefed main and jib. There was some shipping traffic to pay attention to and quite a lot of sailboats enjoying the wind. I woke up from a nap and went out in the cockpit to see Hans and Freja gleefully racing (and beating) a catamaran around the southern point of Langeland.

We'll call this: fishing practice. Hans spooled on something like 1000 meters of line on a new fishing reel (that's 1km!), too loosely. He needed to run it all out and rewind it. Maybe not the best idea when we were sailing at 8 knots. He and Freja took turns reeling it in for almost one hour! Great entertainment for me!

We arrived in Laboe, Germany around eight in the evening and luckily found one of the last slips available in the harbor. As we sent the kids to bed, we made plans to stay the next day and have a beach and ice cream day. Then we checked the weather…

The Kiel Canal, one year later.

We had the dock lines untied after breakfast and we headed south to the entrance of the Kiel Canal. Our weather report the night before showed a brief lull in the southwest winds before they grew strong again along the coast of the Netherlands and Germany. Our choice was between waiting in Laboe indefinitely until the winds blew out of the north (north winds are not the prevailing winds in the summer) or motor as far as possible in very light winds for as long as possible. Watching the calendar (Hans is flying out of Paris at the end of August and friends from Philadelphia were in Amsterdam until August 10), we decided to rev up the Volvo and settle in for a 36 hours of motoring. Very boring, but we decided it would be a better alternative to staying in northern Germany and waiting for rare north summer winds.

The Kiel Canal was as I remembered: calm, warm, easy, with massive ships, sailboats, and powerboats sharing the waterway and cyclists, joggers, and people fishing and picnicking along the shore. I must have picked up whatever stomach bug Freja had a few days ago because I spent most of the day sleeping in the v-berth with zero appetite. Thankfully I felt a lot better when I woke up around six in the evening when it was time to go through the massive lock at the eastern end of the canal.

Some quick morning yoga while we waited for the lock to fill and open.

assembling the new lego kits from LegoLand.

Hello big ship! (And yes, I took the flat calm motoring and sunny skies as an opportunity to do some laundry. My mom always jokes that since we were living aboard and cloth diapering both girls, I've always had some kind of laundry hanging out to dry!)

Some skippers waved, some didn't. Unfortunately, none honked.

The locks are open to both commercial and pleasure vessels, but they certainly take their time operating the pleasure lock. We waited for the lock to open for almost an hour, and with nowhere to tie up to wait we just floated around, trying not to drift into any pilings or the main waterway. Tedious, to say the least. Then we were in the lock, alone. The water rose (or fell, we couldn’t tell!), the gates opened and we were out on the Elbe River. Last summer when we exited the Kiel Canal in Kiel, Germany, we were greeted with a massive rainbow over the southern Baltic Sea. This summer, as we exited the eastern end we were again greeted with a huge rainbow. A lovely coincidence.

Night sailing routines and strategies

The container ships that traverse the Elbe River from the North Sea to Hamburg are massive. They are the huge container ships like the one that went sideways in the Suez Canal. We definitely need to keep a vigilant watch for these ships and we also realized that it was judicious to keep to the very edge of the channel. No need to get too close!

We settled into our nightly watch keeping schedule, three hours on, three hours off. Hans usually takes the first shift, 10PM (22.00) to 1AM (01.00). I am on watch from 1AM (01.00) to 4AM (04.00), then Hans from 4AM (04.00) to 7AM (0.700), and he wakes me for sunrise at 7AM (0.700). We also keep watch in daylight hours, but it is a much more flexible version. “Are you watching for ships?” “Want to take a break, I can be on watch now.” Even on a clear visibility day, a fast ferry or big container ship running at 15-20 knots can seem to suddenly appear out of nowhere. Usually we don’t have to change course, but in busy shipping lanes we’ve had to alter course a few times or the big ships move for us. It is always best to maintain your course for as long as possible, not in a “playing chicken” kind of way, but more to make your intentions and your course very obvious to other ships. We’re not as predictable when we’re sailing at 6 knots compared to a ship steaming along at 12 knots, so while it looks like on the AIS that we’ll meet within 200 meters of a big ship, the reality expands as we get closer. And, on the sea, out of restricted shipping channels, sailboats have right of way so the big ships almost always change course for us, often without any radio contact.

An exception was in the early morning hours at the entrance to the Elbe River. A big ship was on our starboard and needed to make a hard turn to port to rendezvous with a pilot ship at a designated meeting point (marked on the chart). Positive Waves was sailing just to starboard of that meeting point and the ship was to our starboard. We were basically right in the way of where the ship needed to go. The captain hailed us on the VHF, explained his intentions, and I steered us to starboard so I would pass behind his stern and he could go in front of us, almost at a right angle to us. Our closest point was only about 200 meters which is rather close for comfort, but in this situation it was completely controlled and safe.

Across the Wadden Sea to the Netherlands

The winds were forecast to regain strength out of the southwest so we needed to find a harbor to duck into. We looked at our charts and at google maps and decided to try the Standing Mast route from northern Holland to Amsterdam. With more chart consultation and, very importantly, close examination of the tide tables, we left the North Sea at Nordenary and entered the Wadden Sea. The Netherlands are protected by their massive systems of levees, locks, and pumps, but between the dykes and the sea there is a very shallow sea ringed by barrier islands. We passed between two barrier islands and entered the Wadden Sea around 8AM, approximately 24 hours after we left Laboe, Germany.

Another sailboat going out to see at dawn.

When Hans first proposed this idea to me I was less than impressed. By entering at Nordenary, we would shave off at least four hours of our trip but it involved transiting across a “sea” that was dry in many places at low tide. We had to time the tides and our route precisely. As he was selling the idea to me he said, “we’ll just feel our way in there and go slow.” “Feel our way in” was his classic expression when we explored the tidal flats around Corpus Christi and it was my least favorite thing to hear, especially after needing to jump out and push on more than one occasion. But…on the other hand, shortening the passage by four hours was very tempting…

Sailing across the Wadden Sea was a surreal experience. At low tide a lot of it is dry or less than one meter deep. With the centerboard up, Positive Waves draws about one meter. Add high tide to the Wadden Sea and minimum depths increase to 2.5 to 3 meters. No problem at all. BUT, we had to go on a rising tide and we had be across the shallowest parts before the tide started falling. We were extremely lucky with the timing of the tide and entered at low tide. We started in the channel with the rising tide, but realized we were a little early when we started dragging mud. We stopped, dropped the anchor and waited for the tide to fill in. A catamaran was doing the same about 500 meters ahead of us. The channel was marked with big sticks/dead trees with a piece of red plastic clipped on the trunk. After the tide had risen another half meter, we weighed anchor and continued the trek. A few more boats joined and we were part of a convoy of about eight boats traveling with the tide. Before we reached high tide we turned onto a river that carried us to the industrial port of Delfzijl and our starting point for the Standing Mast route. We were officially in the Netherlands and ready for a new and unexpected experience: transiting the Dutch canals!