Voyage Around the World No. 5

Lyndsi McNaughton

July 16, 2010

Dr. Gus Wilson is an office space client at our BusinesSuites Harborplace location in Baltimore, Maryland. Gus is on an annual sail voyage taking him and his wife, Helen, around the world. When their journey is complete we expect to have him back at the office as a client again. Below is the fifth excerpt from his voyage journal. There is a couple more to come.

We sailed an overnight passage along the German and Dutch Frisian Island, staying a mile outside the shipping lanes (the fine for getting closer is about €1000 on the spot) and well away from the islands. We reached Vlieland Island in the Netherlands, where Wings was politely boarded by the Dutch Coast Guard, checking for guns. Vlieland is sandy, picturesque, quiet (no cars), and provided us with a beautiful five-mile hike along the wide sandy beach. Crossing the sand banks inland (the site of Erskine Childers “The Riddle of the Sands”) on a rising tide, along with about 200 other boats, we reached the lock to enter into the shallow (6-9 ft.) Ijsselmeer. Maneuvering for position to enter the lock was interesting. Across the Ijsselmeer, Enkhuizen entertained us with an interesting museum, a reconstruction of 3 Zuider Zee villages. Crossing the even shallower Markelmeer (a rather nasty motorsail into winds of 20-25 knots and more), we reached Amsterdam and the Sixhaven Marina across the channel from the Amsterdam Central Train Station. A free ferry running every 5-10 minutes took us across, although we barely had room to stand among the dozens of bicycles (no cars) on each crossing. As tourists, we visited the Anne Frank House (sad but moving), the excellent Van Gogh Museum, a Rembrandt exhibit in another museum, walked long distanced through more parks, took a canal cruise, walked through the red light district, and enjoyed the painted fiberglass elephants along the streets.

We left Amsterdam early one morning, taking the Nordsee Canal towards a side canal to Haarlem. Soon a harbor patrol boat approached to warn us by loudspeaker that it was very foggy ahead. It was! Nova Scotia type fog: with visibility only 2 or 3 boat lengths. With our eyes glued to the radar and chart plotter we hugged the banks for miles, not able to see the river barges that passed close by. Finally the fog cleared, just as we turned into the side canal. One lock and several bridges later, we docked in Haarlem. A unique experience was paying the toll at one bridge into a wooden shoe dangled from a pole by the bridge tender, as we motored under the raised bridge.

Haarlem is interesting. Our visit coincided with an annual half-marathon race, and a free Stabat Mater concert at a church. The next morning we joined a convoy of sailboats behind a river barge (loaded with American tourists) and stayed close together as they closely-spaced bridges opened to let us pass. That day we went through 27 bridges over about 30 miles. Except for the last, all opened promptly, or at least on schedule. Almost all day we were on a canal in the middle of a dike. On either side the dike sloped away, and we looked down on lower canals, the green countryside, villages, windmills, and once a freeway that passed through the dike underneath us. Strange! At Gouda, the three RR bridges did not open on schedule due to some confusion, but eventually made an unscheduled opening to let us pass and tie up on the other side. A walk into Gouda followed, another interesting city. The next day the canal became more industrial, and we crossed parts of the Rhine River with dense barge and ship traffic.

Willemstad, a fortified village on the Hollandsdiep was again picturesque and fascinating, and of course, located behind a dike. Because of a bridge malfunctioning, Simon and Janet had warned us by email not to take the lock and normal route via Vlissigen, so we continued on to Stellendam, by the Haringvliet, the last of the tidal dams which blocked off the Rhine Delta. The story of the storm and failure of the dikes in 1953 (1835 people killed, and 200,000 made homeless) and the way the Dutch society responded by massively rebuilding the dikes along with dams and locks, probably short of war-time sacrifice, one of the most impressive stories ever a society uniting and working together for its common good.

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