I was wonderfully surprised this morning to receive an email stating that the old bridge blocking our exit would be removed imminently… A little later I was walking up to the heads and saw the honking great crane alongside the bridge. Then watched gleefully as the offending span was hoisted off!

Up…

….Up….

….and AWAY!!!

Our way out is now available through the new (temporary) lifting bridge – once the path is dredged a little deeper…

Our escape route via the new (temporary) lifting bridge.

Meanwhile, as the dreaded virus plays it’s game, many of our options for actually going somewhere else are limited as even sailing boats are being refused entry to various ports – but for the time being, we’re pretty well isolated on the boat, keeping healthy and doing lots of boat chores. Now that we can see an exit at least, we’ll start to slowly provision (without looking like hoarders!) and then probably get out of this harbour and tour around the local anchorages until we can find a country that will allow us to enter!

With the Corona Virus scare in full swing right now, we’ve turned our thoughts to how we might quarantine ourselves… Ordinarily, the boat would seem like a really good place to quarantine oneself – we’re pretty self sufficient (though we did go and buy a few items from the fast depleting grocery store) – and we could simply sail off to a nice pretty destination and wait it out. Unfortunately, we can’t do that because the harbour we’re in is currently blocked: the opening bridge is in need of major maintenance, so they built (took only 1 month!) a new temporary bridge for while it’s out of action. However, in the dismantling of the old bridge, they’ve hit a snag and the “late March” completion date is now in jeopardy – and nobody can tell us when it’ll be resolved. Apparently a permit is required – a process which normally takes 27 weeks!!! (They say it won’t take that long…) So, the old bridge which now can’t open, is blocking our way…

Impressive – Google added the new bridge to their maps within a week of it being built!

So we can’t escape – but at least we can hunker down right here… however, we’re now a boat of 4 – Abigail and Greg arrived on Tuesday for a 3 or 4 day visit… Looks like it could turn into longer as the US halts flights from Europe to the US. It’s lovely to have them stay with us (though my liver is taking a serious hit!) but the food and drink becomes a more limiting factor! They’re going to try making a run for it tomorrow – by bus to London – which Trump seems to feel is a safer place and therefore not hit by the travel restrictions – then flying back to Texas. If Trump changes his mind quickly (no, that’s never happened has it?) Abs and Greg could find themselves stranded again… in which case, a trip back here or up to Yorkshire might be in order…

It’s all rather fun in an odd sort of way – though it might well mess up all our cruising plans this year as country after country decides to close it’s ports – or insist on lengthy quarantine requirements…

We’ll see…

The Dreaded Bug

Laurie and I had a very nice day yesterday – headed by Waterbus up to Alblasserdam and then cycled to Kinderdijk to view the old windmills – which were built around 1740 and still working… Super day out!

Kinderdijk

All from the 1740’s

Turning quite fast…

Today Abigail and Greg arrive for a visit – and it’s raining cats and dogs!

So the last couple of weeks we’ve had some visitors to Toodle-oo!

First sister Kate came over for a week aboard – we spent most of the time touring around Dordrecht and managed to catch Carnival too – a most enjoyable, family oriented day. We also took a day trip to Delft on their market day. Laurie was tempted to buy a new teapot – until the price sticker was observed!

Enjoying a Carnival Day drink (or two)…

We also got a flying visit from best mate Steve Sykes who I haven’t seen for yonks! All in very good order – it was great to see him again and hope to see more of him as we move towards warmer climes!

Steve Sykes at the entrance to Dordrecht

Next week Abigail arrives with her beau Greg in tow. Looking forward to hearing how her recent multi-engine instructor training went.

Other than a six week (ten for Laurie) break around Thanksgiving and Christmas in the USA, during which I managed a trip down to Dallas to visit Abigail and Greg for a few days, we’ve been hard at work on numerous projects around the boat. The project list started with nearly 70 items – which has now been whittled down dramatically.

Among the more mundane annual servicing projects, we’ve made repairs to both the boats heater and the watermaker, but more exciting, we have; new curtains, new indirect and dimmable LED lighting in the salon, new task lighting in the galley, new galley faucet, rebuild of the

Indirect lights below new curtains!

hydraulic backstay, new high water bilge level alarm and an overhaul of the rudder actuation arm.

Still to come: new extractor fan above the galley stove, perhaps new cushions in the salon as well as completion of the more mundane stuff in preparation for the coming season.

And where are we headed this year? We’ll probably get going in early April and head towards the south coast of the UK, then head towards Brittany or perhaps go direct across Biscay to the Spanish Rias where we’re hoping to spend a significant part of the early summer. Afterwards, we’ll continue south and then turn into the Mediterranean. Not sure how far we’ll get, but possibly as far as Venice for Christmas? Who knows!

We arrived in Dordrecht and immediately fell in love with the place! So much so, we’ve decided to stay here for the winter – instead of heading to a planned winter berth in Southampton…

Dordrecht is a very old city, with plenty of history and loads of things for us to do to while away the winter months. Since we’re here for 6 months, we’ve taken up Dutch residency – which will give Laurie a full 5 years of being able to travel around Europe without having to worry about time limits… Hopefully by then, the Portuguese government will have finally considered her application for citizenship!

Our winter berth

Looking south from the Church tower

Gateway to Dordrecht

Boat chores are well underway – but there’s plenty of those to keep us busy too!

The boat chores… this is the low pressure watermaker pump – new seals and new bearings now installed…

Can you guess what this is??

We are continuing to love the Netherlands and at Bas and Agnes’ (Tisento) recommendation, decided to take the Standing Mast Route south through Amsterdam and Gouda to Dordrecht. We’re currently in Gouda.

The route through Amsterdam is a convoy at night – so that they only have to open the countless bridges once. We were in a small convoy of 3 boats – following Cayos, a Dutch boat that had done the route many times.

The night convoy begins…

Another bridge

It was quite challenging keeping close enough to the boat in front so that the bridge keepers could limit the time the bridges were open. I think there were 14 bridges or locks – and we arrived at about 3 am after a late 1:30am departure.

The following day, we followed Cayos south to their home area – but having ‘left’ us, they came rush back to us – to stop me going over a really shallow area!! Thanks Cayos! We anchored in a big shallow lake and slept!

Free curbside mooring

There are free moorings available all along – you can typically tie up for 3 days. It’s been really nice to be able to get off the boat and explore the local surroundings wherever we are.

At one spot we managed to arrive during their festival week and enjoyed an interesting flower parade through town.

Arrived in one town for their Flower Parade

Last float in the parade was by Botox – complete with (I think) a Tittiebar??!!

Unfortunately, our chosen mooring in the center of Gouda was not available – as the bridge was broken! So we’re in a little marina on the outskirts – but an easy walk in to town – which is much like a mini Amsterdam. We were very lucky that Baudine from s/v Bojangles (currently sailing down past New York) was at home in her lovely house near Gouder and she came and gave us a tour of the place and out to a farmers cheese maker where we sampled and purchased the goodies! She then provided an excellent evening meal for us – thanks Baudine!

Farmers Cheese (Gouda) with Baudine from Bojangels

Gouda

Gouda is like a mini Amsterdam

But Gouda sure has some strange art!

Tomorrow we’ll move on again – to Dordrecht – another marina, but right in the center of town…

Furling the sails.

Picture at the top was of this windmill’s main gear as it was spinning – quite an experience… The whole top shakes with the sails.

After a wonderfully benign passage down the North Sea, we motored into Amsterdam where we’ve had a great visit – my new favorite city!

Not only did we meet Ineke Huijer on Lily (no longer OCC) – who lives here, but we also got together with Bas and Agnes, currently on a sabatical from Tisento which remains in Australia – and topping up their cruising kitty, but also Odette Hasbun and Francisco Melton aboard Perigrinus and finally our old friend Brigit.

Along with that social calendar – which took a toll on our livers – we also enjoyed several days walking around the fascinating city of Amsterdam – superb architecture, lots of vibrant people and must be a million bicycles or more!

Typical Amsterdam Scene

Blurry Bas and Agnes

Booze Cruise!

Seven Bridges

Yikes! Bikes!

Tomorrow we will depart – but get the opportunity to sail in the midnight convoy through Amsterdam on our way down to Vlissingen.

We enjoyed Norway for a few more days waiting out the weather in Grimstad and then in the little anchorage at Hesnesoeya, which provided very easy access to open water for our trip to Sweden.

Our last Norwegian anchorage – picturesque!

We left Norway on August 24th early (4:30am) and had a good sail to Sweden – mostly with fair winds from behind and a lovely sunny day – quite a contrast from last week’s effort. We did have to motor a little in order to keep our speed up as we were trying to avoid a nighttime landfall, but were able to sail again towards the Swedish coast. About 5 miles out we managed to snag a fishing pot which stopped us dead. Removing it proved to be problematic, but eventually freed ourselves by turning on the engine and letting the rope cutter in front of the propeller do it’s magic. Fortunately, the pot remained serviceable, so the fisherman won’t have lost all his tackle. We eventually arrived at our chosen anchorage by Apelvik in the Gothenburg archipelago at 9:15pm.

Swimming in Sweden to clear the prop of fishing pot remnants.

Prop cleared!

The following morning we headed south to one of the southern islands where our good friends Ian and Linda aboard Ocean Hobo were awaiting us. It was a flat calm sea and sunny day so we were motoring through the channels and not paying attention nearly closely enough such that I nearly T-Boned a small sailboat that was crossing our path. Quite a wake-up call.

Ian and Linda had found a marvelous little anchorage with complete protection from the weather (and a little beach!) – though quite crowded with weekend revelers. It was fantastic to have some friends around us – we’ve been largely on our own since leaving Islay back in June! Booze flowed!

Ian and Linda found an anchorage with a beach!

The anchorage…

We stayed in Sweden only a few days and then sailed with Ocean Hobo over to the Danish island of Laesoe where Linda and Ian stayed just one night, heading south to meet friends in the Limfjord Canal. We were heading in a slightly different direction, towards the next island, Anholt and would leave the following day, with plans to then continue south for the next couple of weeks towards the Keil Canal. Best laid plans…  In the end, we changed our minds and decided instead to head to the Limfjord too and hope we’d find a weather window from there south to Amsterdam.

Free dock in Aarlborg – but only one night…

Pretty street in Aarlborg

We are once again again cruising in company with Ian and Linda and currently sitting in a totally enclosed anchorage waiting out yet more windy conditions!

September is here – it’s windy and it’s wet!

Sorry… It’s been a month since the last post…

We did indeed make a dash south and found ourselves in something of a convoy – with 8 other boats showing up on our AIS (vessel identification system) and since the Norwegian boats are rarely equipped with AIS, there were probably three times that number. We had a very good downwind sail and arrived to a very nice open bay anchorage a couple of miles outside of Egersund which we enjoyed for two nights with a large catamaran anchored a few hundred yards away. When we left, we kicked ourselves as it turned out the Cat was American! We yelled out as we passed and raised the captain who turned out to be French!

We carried on south east and found ourselves a very nice spot in Hidra – anchoring for a couple of days there and then moving to the tiny marina for a couple more. This is probably the most picturesque spot we’ve been to in Norway – a cluster of islands with rocky hills – along with some well preserved German WWII fortifications. The attraction of moving to the Marina was that it was a part of a small restaurant – with what turned out to be excellent dishes.

Hidra – Can you spot Toodle-oo! in top left anchorage?

We went to another harbour on Hydra, Rasvag – with a VERY tight entrance into a completely surrounded bay – surrounded by houses. We felt like goldfish – so in the morning picked up sticks and took ourselves off to Fleckkerfijord.

Entrance to the ‘Fish Bowl’ harbour

Turned out we’d arrived in Fleckkerfjord on festival day – celebrating everything Salmon! We were persuaded therefore to take another marina berth – for a huge fee of Free for the first night, then $6/night! While there, a Newspaper reporter came and interviewed us – apparently an American boat is something of a rarity! It would be nice if we could understand Norwegian as I’ve no idea what she reported!

Fleckkerfjord

Fleckkerfjord

We did a nice long walk in Flekkerfjiord – really interesting – but sadly when we got back Laurie found 2 ticks on her – which later proved to have Lime – and she’s just finished a 2 week course of preventive antibiotics.

There’s a bit of a cape on the south called Lindesnes which apparently can kick up nasty in adverse wind – so we staged ourselves in a nice little town, Farsund – just tying up to the dock along the high street at no cost (having tried 5 times to anchor in an adjacent cove). We sampled the best shrimp – which we now seek out routinely wherever we go – but Farsund’s so far has been the best!

Farsund

With some decent wind we managed to get around the cape and plonked ourselves in Mandal for a few days – we then went on to a series of anchorages along the Blindleia – trying to do the Norwegian thing of tying up to a rock face or bows-to mooring – failed miserably – but managing to shoehorn our way into smaller and smaller spots. Had an excellent stop in a tiny bay in Ny-Hellgoya – another spot with old German WWII fortifications (we’ve seen quite a few along the way). We finally entered one anchroage to find two other boats anchored (not tied to the rocks) – we’ve hardly seen anyone conventionally anchored – other than foreign boats!

Ny-Hellesund

Ny-Hellesund

Strident Laurie

Sheep or Goat?

Our most recent anchorage was a very small spot – we had to make sure we were right in the middle before dropping the anchor – so checked distances with a golfing rangefinder to make sure. We were rewarded with a very peaceful morning view…

Neat anchorage

Calm or what??

Yesterday we upped anchor and headed for Denmark. We got about an hour into and wimped out! The forecast was for 16 – 18knots with gusts to 26 – 28 bit we had sustained 26 – 28 (or it was a long gust!) there was also more wave action than we expected and since we would be sailing overnight, we turned and headed further north east along Norway’s southern coast and found ourselves a spot in Grimstad’s guest harbour where we could lick our wounds.

With wind remaining high for the next several days, we’ve changed plan (oh what a surprise) and will now head further up the coast and then make our way across to Sweden – and are hoping to bump into our friends Linda and Ian on Ocean Hobo who have been in Denmark and are slowly making their way north along the Swedish coast…