We left the mooring at Keteldeep after a couple of days moored up on the waiting quay for the lock and tried to contact the lockkeeper. Same problem as before – no reply. Then a cruiser moored up behind us, the woman complaining that we had moored in the middle of the quay. “Well, there’s room for you behind us and room for another four boats in front. What’s the problem?” Their attempt at mooring made us realise why they needed the whole quay! She then told us that we must wait for the green light before entering the lock, as if we don’t know that already. When it came time for us to set off we took off the front rope and reversed onto our rear spring to force the front end out from the quay as usual. The lady behind was in a panic ‘You’re moving backwards into us’. “No, we’re not, we still have our spring on!”
Through the lock and we found the mooring downstream of the Ketelsluis completely empty.
We moored up at one end while the cruiser moored right in the middle! By the evening the whole 200m was completely full.
George and Suzanna came over from Dronten for a drink and the following day we set off for a mooring about 8 kms along the canal. We had ridden our bikes to it a couple of days before just to see what it was like and to have a picnic lunch there. Sadly the only bench to sit on had been made unusable by the crew of one of the cruisers. They hadn’t sat on the bench themselves, just parked their picnic chairs so close to it that it was impossible for us to do so. Yes, we should have just sat down on it and let them feel uncomfortable enough to move, but we are not like that, so we just sat on the quay elsewhere rather uncomfortably for our own picnic lunch and looked daggers at the cruiser couple.
When we arrived in the boat we had the mooring to ourselves that night, but the farmer opposite decided this was the time to get in his crop. So rather than the peaceful evening which we had hoped for, we had his combi and tractors working till it got dark. Typical!
Finally we got to the lock at the end of this canal – the Lage Vaart – which would get us back up 6m onto the Randmeer. We contacted the lockkeeper on the VHF who asked us for our dimensions – 19m. That’s OK he said, the lock is 20m x 5m wide! Wow! That’s our size of lock! We’re only 4.8m wide but most locks in France, even the Freycinet locks, are 5.10m or 5.20m. 5m dead on felt pretty tight and our rudder sticks out a good metre behind making us as near as dammit 20m long. Actually in the event I think there was room for 22m but it was fun to fit so well.
We moored on De Legge Island where we were surprised to find we had to pay 90 cents/metre. All the free moorings seem to have been taken over now.
However, the next day we peeled off to a pier which jutted out into the channel at 90 degrees.
On one side was an old barge of some sort and the other side was empty. This mooring seemed to be tied in with a museum in which an old steam engine driven paddle-wheel had emptied the adjoining land into the main channel. It was free to visit so naturally we did that then the owner of the old barge appeared and offered to show Alex round his boat. It was an old German harbour master’s barge but steam driven. The owner was in the early stages of re-building the steam engine but evidently still had a lot to do.
Alex had a good look round this barge then showed Cess (pronounced caisse) round RICCALL (as you do). He was quite impressed with what we had done and said it had inspired him to put his all into his project. How kind, and good luck Cess!
We failed to get into our next island mooring as the owner of one of the cruisers was absolutely NOT prepared to move his boat back a couple of metres to make room for us. Bastard! So we motored on and felt our way into a nice sheltered mooring on De Hooft island. There were precious few things to tie a rope to but another barge owner already moored up pointed to the almost hidden ring and suggested a nearby tree. All went well until the middle of the night when the wind turned through 180 degrees and became much stronger. Now we were in the teeth of it with waves breaking against the hull and the rudder crashing about.
At three o'clock in the morning Alex put the rudder hard over and secured it with an enormous ‘G’ clamp kept specifically for that purpose.
In the morning all the other boats had left and we couldn't wait to get away ourselves!
We set off making a bee-line for the deep channel which was only about 50m away but after a few metres from our mooring it was obvious that we were in shallow water. Alex gave it more throttle and we slowly slowly ploughed our way through the sandy bottom until eventually we got to the deeper water. Phew! That was close to another going-aground. Our way into the mooring had been fine but we were coming away from it in a different direction.
We got to Muiden lock without further incident and a few days later we arrived at our booked mooring in Vreeswijk. RICCALL moored in a pleasant spot quite close to the old disused lock out onto the river. We felt happy leaving her there while we returned to the UK for the month of August.
The usual Dutch view!
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