Ostend at Anchor Festival Day 1 - Thursday 26th May

Bonify is in there somewhere - radar scanner showing on wooden mast to the right of the station roof


No ramblings today, just Festival photos
Sorry - it's Bonify in Mercator Dock, broken Rule No 1

Dutch flat-bottoms on show







Comments

Post a Comment

We've set this up so anyone can comment - though we'll see your comment before it's published on the blog - please comment away!

Popular posts from this blog

Inland Schleswig-Holstein

Image
Wednesday 19th July to Thursday 20th July - River Eider inland Reasons to take the River Eider route to the Baltic: 1. It's easier to get to from Heligoland (in the right conditions). 2. You avoid travelling (and crossing) the River Elbe with all its traffic and strong current. 3. You avoid the massive ship lock at Brunsbüttel where we have heard of yachts having to wait as long as 4 hours out in the Elbe before locking in. There are some issues with the locks and they are not all operating. 4. There's no commercial traffic, till you join up with the Kiel Canal 5. Once in, it's more interesting to travel along a river with small towns to visit than 100km of straight ship canal. So, Tönning was our first town with its small harbour a feature in itself overlooked by houses and cafés. When the tide went out overnight we didn't see the mud, we just floated in almost no water.  On Wednesday we moved on to Friedrichstadt, just 10nm further on, a pleasant short trip with withi...
Read more

Ramsgate to Gravelines Sunday 22nd May

Image
Sunday is a pretty soggy day. Leave Ramsgate 5am in fine drizzle and motor sail south (what wind there is is bang on the nose) towards South Goodwin passing a sign of the times in the form of a large Border Patrol vessel anchored off the beach between Ramsgate and Deal. Her sister ship was in Ramsgate so they are pretty active in this area. Passing South Foreland we are called up by Dover Coastguard, showing off that they can see us on AIS, call sign and all (Bonify: Mike Papa Papa Tango Six), and asking our intentions. Well we are heading for France on a course appropriate for crossing the shipping lanes so it seems pretty obvious to us. Howard resists the temptation to reply “Purely honourable”, plays it dead straight and is rewarded by being wished “Good watch” as they sign off. We sail across the shipping lanes, apart from a short burst of motor to get us safely clear of one south bound ship, and by 9am we have logged 21nautical miles and are heading up the French coast, passi...
Read more

Eider Canal

Image
Friday 21st July - Eider canal The Nordfeld lock which brings us out of tidal waters for the last time (the Baltic Sea doesn't really have tides) is only a couple of miles from Friedrichstadt and once through it we are in the Eider Canal.  Canal it may be but it looks and feels like a river wending its way northwards and eastwards in big sweeping curves for mile upon mile.  Most of the supposed boaty stopping places from now on (marked on our chart there with a yacht symbol) are tiny: just a few posts by the bank with a few small motor boats in and almost no sailing boats. Süderstapel is an exception and is somewhere we might stop another time to have a look round. Our rather ancient pilot book tells us to look out for a colony of storks near the church and we are lucky enough to see one stork fly over as we pass.  Another highlight spotted on the river bank is a pair of musicians: one playing some kind of squeeze box and one a cello. We throttle back to listen but the br...
Read more