My anxiety or insomnia - whichever came first and caused the other - has kept me up all bloody night and most of the day until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Jarno has the boat and continues into the fog, towards Amsterdam. When I wake up, it's already dark and the fog has cleared. No wind, we're motoring again.
We arrive at the Iljmuiden harbour at 2am and I decide to wait until morning before heading in. I leave Aliisa drifting and go to sleep. Jarno is already snoring in the saloon bunk. At dawn I drive Aliisa into the first ever lock in her (or my) life. It's very exciting at first but when the opposite doors open, with no noticeable difference in the water level, I feel kinda ripped off. Nevermind. Amsterdam is three hours away.
We drive right into the city and find a berth in the Sixhaven marina. I have taken the Finnish flag down and put back the Aussie one, as it should be. No-one seems to care, neither do I, about customs or immigration. (I had the Finnish flag up in Falmouth, UK to disguise myself as a Finnish yacht because England is very strict about animals. Charlie never left the yacht)
Amsterdam was the same as before. Hot, full of tourists and friendly. I headed straight for the red light district. There's not many places in the world where you get the same feel. Porn shops, coffee shops, "coffee shops", women behind the windows giving you the c'mon, restaurants and live shows, cobblestone streets, narrow alleys, street art, canals and more canals, pubs, kebab shops, police on bicycles, groups of young having a picnic while cruising past on a speedboat or a dinghy and all this crowded with thousands of tourists, locals, women, children, families, old and young. Everything just is, without judgement. That's why I like it.
Time is running short, though. So is money. A week in the city of sin was enough. Ok, it wasn't enough. I could have easily stayed there to live. Get a job and become an Amsterdamian? Hmm, but there was a promise to be kept, I had to winter the yacht in Lake Saimaa according to the ongoing monthly article in the Finnish VENE magazine. The North Sea was calling us.
According to my homework, using the canals was not a short cut, at least for time. We took the same three-hour cruise up to Iljmuiden and took the outside route, heading to Kiel Canal. A good wind on the beam gave us a day and night of perfect sailing. Things changed when we hit the river Elbe, our last piece of water affected by tides. And the tide was... yep, against us. Nevermind, this was not the first time I've let the Yanmar do the talking. Slowly but surely we inched our way towards Cuxhaven and that's when the tide turned. By midday we were behind another lock - still no rise or fall in the waterlevel - and in my first-ever tideless water, the busiest artificial waterway in the world (by number of vessels), the Kiel Canal.
We decided not to tacle the canal but instead look for a pub, a nice meal and a cold beer. The very first marina behind the locks had one space left against the wall. The space was 9,75 meters long and I know it because after parking Aliisa, her anchor was above the backdeck of the yacht infront of us and my wind vane was alongside the anchor of the yacht behind us. We got some dirty looks before more space was made for Aliisa. We were in Brunsbuettel and in Germany. There was a sign ashore about customs clerance but it was in german, so I ignored it. We found the restaurant (chicken snitchtzhhchel, yum) and the cold beer. While having our lunch, we asked a local woman about night-life in the township. She said that they had an ice-cream bar in the main street. Jarno and I decided to continue soon.
ALIISA IS LEAKING!
By evening the marina was packed up to eight deep of yachts alongside eachother. It was a pleasure to continue sleeping in the morning, against the wall, while all the shuffling was going on. We eventually took off and started motoring down the canal. With my last automatic bilge pump long gone, I occasionally switched the manual pump on. To my surprise, there was a lot of water coming out, for a long time. The bilge was filling up - not alarmingly fast, but a good bucketful hour or so. I started to investigate.
The cause turned out to be the stern tube, the very same spot where the strange metallic "klonk" noise came from after leaving Cape Town. Was the shaft bent? Whatever the problem was, the sternd tube was getting thin and water was pissing out from underneath, from the most difficult place to get to. The tube could not be fixed properly without welding and if the leak would get worse, we could not continue without buying a big pump. I had no money left for a big pump, neither did I have any desire to cross the Baltic with a big pump keeping us afloat.
We made a turn to Rendsburg, knowing that there was a marina there. I was hoping for some engineering help and worried about the leak, my ability to fix it and the possible delay to our race against the northenr summer. Before the marina, we pass a large (47m?) motorvessel, The Nomad. A guy from the deck yelled out: "You're from Strailia, eh?". The familiar aussie accent turned into a familiar face, it was Shaun from Cairns. He used to drive the Fitzroy Flyer (high speed passenger ferry) while I was working at the resort of the same island. "I'll chuck some fenders down, mate. Pull alongside, we've got the barbie goin'" he added. I started to visually measure the possibility of Aliisa's spreaders not banging against the widening hull of this big red steel monster.
Some time later we were enjoying a good Aussie BBQ with the crew. We got internet access, hot showers and most importantly, a fully qualified mechanic crawling in the bilge of Aliisa and putting the best possible temporary fix for the leaking stern tube.
