Denmark and Germany

The past week has been spent sailing down from Denmark to Germany and through the Kiel Channel over to Cuxhaven on the mouth of the Elbe river. We are staying an extra night in Cuxhaven, as there are strong warnings against going out against westerly winds, and there will be southerly winds tomorrow, which will be great.

Working with tides and currents in addition to the wind is a bit new to us, we will certainly make some errors along the way as we get used to them. Fortunately we have good navigational systems, and all our course materials from when we learned about tides. We have been comparing our Reed’s almanac against our plotter (Navionics) and another source (Open CPN). As long as all are within 15-20 minutes of each other, it is good enough for us.

The Kiel Channel was lovely, very quiet and rural, and the place where we stopped for the night was a little dock by a lock in the middle of open pastures. Another boat recognized Lulu on the channel and sent a picture to Roger in Finland who sold Lulu to us, the world is really a small place. Arriving in Cuxhaven, while waiting for the bridge to the city marina to open, we met another Swedish couple from Gothenburg; Tomas and Tina, who treated us to a refreshing glass of beer in the sweltering warmth.

Denmark was really lovely, and Kungsör was also very picturesque. We were told that Marstal was renowned for it’s quaint beauty, but we found much to admire in Kungsör as well and couldn’t place one over the other. Our Friday trip to Kiel was a bit longer than expected because we planned to fill our tanks before the channel at the fuel barge that our Reed’s told us was there; only to find that there was no fuel barge. We motored over to Laboe where there was a filling station, but it had closed for the weekend. Fortunately, the filling station at Strande was still open so we were able to tank up and head back to Holtenau and prepare for the channel entry on Saturday morning. If you follow us on Marine traffic, you could see that we zig-zagged around the Kiel area, looking for fuel.

Saturday morning we saw that a bunch of small boats headed to the channel entrance, so we stressed out of the waiting dock and went over to the holding area, where we had to circle around for approximately 2,5 hours while they sent all the big industrial ships through, until they finally accepted smaller boats. The actual lock was very gentle and we barely noticed that the water changed levels before they started opening the locks; very different from the thundering flows in the Göta Canal the prior year.