Wednesday 1 November
I knew it was going to be a different kind of day when it began with two unusual events: first, we were ready to leave Veerhaven on time, and second, Mate was at the helm to take me away from the pontoon and back out into the river. Granted, it was a pretty straightforward departure, but there wasn’t a lot of spare space, should anything have gone wrong.
We rejoined the river traffic safely, and then dawdled ahead of a huge barge attended by two tugs, while we waited for the nice man to lift the opening part of the Erasmus Bridge. This is an enormous piece of engineering, as the bridge carries road traffic, trams, the ubiquitous bicycles and pedestrians from the North to the South side of the city, and the whole operation took fifteen minutes. There are special traffic lights, which go from red to red-over-green and eventually to green, far too slowly for my impatient Skipper, nervous of bigger ships bearing down on me from behind.
Mate kept her cool, and further up the river was to need it a lot more, as I passed under a motorway bridge with a clearance of 24 metres. My air draught is 21 metres, so from down at deck level the underside of that bridge looked very close to the top of my aerial, some 30 centimetres higher than the masthead. With the relief of that particular clearance still fresh, it was time to cross the channel to follow the Hollandse IJssel river to the North.
It’s all very well being a river/canal barge for a while, never feeling the wind in my sails, but it’s a bit undignified for my fenders and mooring ropes to just be left lying along my side decks. I suppose it makes sense, when I passed through a number of locks and under bridges that open over narrow channels at the side of the waterway, but still.
Gradually we left the city wharves and apartment buildings behind, and the scenery became more attractive: smarter houses with their own river frontage and moorings, the occasional windmill, a ferry, trees… and reeds. Apparently it’s very like sailing on the Norfolk Broads, where the dykes are high enough to contain the water, and seriously limit the view.
It was a dry day, but overcast and the light breeze was quite chilly. Still on the helm, Mate was glad to make the final turn into a narrow channel to our mooring for the next two nights, on the edge of Gouda.