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Showing posts from July, 2019

Southbound, Netherlands to Spain

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Isla Salvora, Spain Our fine mid-June weather as we departed Germany soon deteriorated. The sun had disappeared after the first day, and by the time we were approaching the Frisian island of Terschelling the weather was wet and blowing a near gale. All hands (both of us!) were busy with lookout, depthsounder, chartplotter, radar, and radio as we jibed back and forth running down the winding channel. We whooshed by unfamiliar buoy shapes in the gloom remembering the pilot book’s standard warning to follow buoys rather than follow a channel by chartplotter - because the sands shift and channels change….. The radio regularly and disconcertingly blared a warning to some sailing yacht (not us, we didn’t think) apparently blundering into dangerous water. We had timed our arrival well as the last half of the flood carried us into the Waddenzee, but with fair current and a following wind things were happening fast. We rounded and dropped the sails and motored into the wind up the l...