A light southwesterly breeze tickled the transoms of 26 motorboats from the MBM Cruising Club as they departed from Nieuwpoort in Belgium heading north along a haze-shrouded coast yesterday (30 July 2001).
A light southwesterly breeze tickled the transoms of 26 motorboats from the MBM Cruising Club as they departed from Nieuwpoort in Belgium heading north along a haze-shrouded coast yesterday (30 July 2001).
After the flat water of the day before, it seemed almost unreasonable to be faced by waves of any nature but if you are going to encounter them on a motorboat, running with them downwind is the most comfortable way, especially as we had also planned proceedings so that boats were taking the tide along the fast-flowing Westerschelde and hence, could keep wind and tide together.
Many other craft were also enjoying the weather on the same day and there were enough yachts spotted on passage along the Westerschelde to fill a sizeable marina, as well as a large convoy of Dutch motoryachts running nose to tail. Commercial traffic for once was light with no sign of anything moving in Zeebrugge and not much heading to or from Antwerp either.
All MBM boats reached the sanctuary of Vlissingen’s harbour arm by 1400 in the afternoon, having departed at between 0715 and 1030 in the morning. Once inside the lock, it was time to get out of the seagoing mindset and adjust for the run through the Kanaal door Walcharen’s five lifting bridges. One Cruising Club member observed that there appears to be little co-ordination regarding the lifting of these as far as boats are concerned and progress is a stop-start affair. But the bridges’ primary function is to put traffic across the canal, not boats underneath and so rush-hour periods can be particularly slow as far as leisure mariners are concerned.
On our boat, no-one cared. A sign on a building in Middleburg said it was 30C, the blue skies tended to agree and we had all participants safely tucked up on the Dutch inland system.
Safely? Well, not quite. One boat unfortunately found an underwater concrete cap close to a barge pile with one outdrive and so we’re going to be checking out our skills at replacing Duoprops this morning. Once locked through onto the Veersemeer another seemed to take a rather strange course around the many (and sometimes confusing) marks that peg out the shallow bits around this inverted sausage of a lake’s many islands. And yet another arrived on one engine due to a leaking fuel union, but had the spares to deal with it afterwards.
That was just about the sum of the woes and everything else was good with the world. There are around 20 children and teenagers on this fleet and the sound of them swimming and whooping with the relief of arriving at Delta Marina near Kortgene on the Veersemeer expressed perhaps what those who chose to stay dry were also feeling?the holiday had now really begun.
More news soon.