Fleeing the heat from Medemblik

I was just coming back from a week of sailing on Sunbeam. Between that, the trip back and the heat wave that was raging in the Netherlands (and Europe), I must not have slept more than 9h that week. But by the by, I managed to get Elvira ready to depart (albeit with some sacrifice on what I wanted to do, like the passive AIS, changing the depth sounder/speed log, …).

Anyhow, I wanted to get back to sailing and the feelings I had on Elvira last year. So far so good, I found a really good trim to go upwind and Elvira was flying fine in the IJsselmeer: no waves & just enough wind to get a decent speed.

All was going well until the lock. I arrived there, contacted them on the VHF and waited for a while for a big barge to arrive and go in the lock first. While I was tied up on the waiting dock, I chatted with another solo sailor, who told me I'd have the tide with me on the other side of the lock (while I thought that I wouldn't).

So once on the other side, I thought let's go, let's get to Harlingen today. But… well wrong choice. The tide was hours away from slack, hours more from becoming a following tide. So here I was, trying to move with the engine and the sails going about 1.5kts… It took so long to get to Harlingen that indeed in the end the tide was starting to get with me a bit. I almost thought of going to Terschelling directly, but well, the Wadden sea is not the place to do night solo-sailing. So I stopped in Harlingen around 10pm, got into the first inside harbour and met a Swedish who's captaining one of these flat-bottom sailboat doing charter who was kind enough to help me tie up alongside another of these giants.

A bit hard to see here, but on the horizon a huge flock of birds is taking off.

Crossed a flat-bottom Dutchy.

On the other side of the lock.