On July 21st, Saturday morning, I arrived from Zurich by train and Maria, Frederik and Sofia were already in Holland having attended their respective holiday camps (at least the kids...). Unfortunately the car, our reasonably trusted Renault Espace, decided to more or less break down (distribution belt almost worn through making a loud sound and a leaking radiator...) so we had no choice but to leave it in Zeist where we found the nearest Renault dealer who would be able to fix it. But not that same day obviously so we were stuck with all our things in the car and we weren't even in IJmuiden yet. To gain some inspiration I phoned Nanne who would be joining on the main trip south from IJmuiden to Vlissingen that evening. As luck would have it again he was right there in Zeist too! and was able to take most of our gear in his car. We borrowed a car from Renault, picked up Sofia from her pony camp and finally made it to IJmuiden by train and fast ferry from Amsterdam.
In the evening we prepared Struana for our trip and Nanne + a friend, Martijn, joined us later in the evening. Because of the westerly wind which still had some life in her at that time was due to fade completely during the night we decided to leave at around midnight, hoisting the full main and the No 1 genoa. On a close reach we headed out in a south westerly direction to eventually stay well clear of the harbour entrance into Rotterdam which gets a bit busy and is not an ideal place for small boats to cross the traffic lane. The wind did eventually fade completely though and in view of our need to be in Vlissingen before 17:00 on Sunday (to catch the tide and the marina there required a high tide to enter) we motored through most of the early hours of Sunday. As the sun came up again we were happily motor sailing our way south passing Zeeland with its characteristic landmarks at Oostkapelle and Domburg.
We swept into Vlissingen on the powerful flooding tide adding 2 to 3 knots to our speed over land and arrived in the marina where we had handily reserved a berth as other yachts were rather short of spaces to stay. The entire crew stepped off, Nanne and Martijn went home and Frederik and Sofia went to stay with their grandma in Oostkapelle. So Maria and I stayed on board, rather tired after a night out at sea. Right next door to the marina there was an absolutely horrific funfare but due to the tiredness this did not keep us awake for long. We did not realise yet, either, that the bulk of the nice moments of this holiday were now behind us and that from that moment on, Struana would demonstrate to us the full range of equipment failures one can encounter when on a boat. We thought we had seen it all with the car not managing to take us all the way to IJmuiden, but no, that was a relatively minor inconvenience.The next day Maria and I decided to head out quite early, to get to Middelburg and stay there for the day to have coffees and stroll around the town, just, well, relaxing. So we cast off, left our berth and made it out of the narrow entrance of the harbour back onto the Westerschelde, the main waterway leading to Antwerp. Screaming tide against, but that was only for half a mile or so as we headed into the old ferry port and gently drifted into the lock, which was waiting for us, opened. There was very little wind so, using my adopted and preferred way of mooring of using little to no reverse on the engine, we gently came to a halt and tied up against the concrete wall of the lock. The doors of the lock closed and as often happens there were some currents in the basin as it emptied into the canal beyond. Without springs the boat would have a natural tendency to move around a bit so the engine occasionally provides handy assistance in keeping the boat in place. Odd thing I felt was that nothing happened, when putting the engine in reverse. Not suspecting anything in particular (it's hard to see any propwash when in reverse) I waited till the doors opened and we could leave. Putting the engine in gear however resulted in exactly no action, something had indeed gone wrong with the propulsion. Looking down below the gear change mechanism was fine so either the gearbox had failed or... there was no more propellor hanging below the boat. I gingerly informed the lock master by radio that we had no more propulsion. He came down from his control tower and suggested we pulled the boat out of the lock and moored her up just beyond. I decided to go for a dive and check the underwater. Now, I hate swimming underwater, especially underneath a boat. But to feel the bare splined drive shaft of the sail drive with no propellor was truly shocking... The propellor had fallen off just as we drifted to a halt in the lock.
At that time I realised that the holiday had aborted more or less before it even started so all there was left to do now was figure out how to get home. Bearing in mind the warranty which the boat still 'enjoyed' I phoned X-Yachts in Denmark, but all were on holiday and would not be back. Then I continued my calling to X-Yachts in Holland who were receptive and extremely helpful, sourcing a new prop that same day and dispatching by courier to my mother's address in Oostkapelle. In addition I made contact with a local diver who was only too happy to go and take a look in the lock for any parts I might be interested in... Although the prop was not found (we only had 10 minutes during which the lock was put out of action), a thrust washer was, which was exactly the piece of equipment which would not be sent by X-Yachts but without which I would not continue at all.
So, with a replacement prop on its way, now came the discussion of how to put it on and, in particular, where. Near Vlissingen there were no cranes large enough to lift Struana out, nor did I feel like hiring a mobile crane because that surely would be really expensive. So we decided to use my diver friend to get towed to Veere, where in the vicinity there was a boat crane which could lift Struana out. In hindsight all seems so simple and straightforward, but troubleshooting this particular issue was time consuming and rather stressful actually. Maria did great by preparing a lovely lunch... So, here we go, with our able motor launch alongside the crippled sailing yacht, making our way through Walcheren:
Perhaps I wasn't entirely truthful when I indicated that the best part of the holiday was behind us. The trip through Walcheren was nice, relaxing even, with nothing to do but enjoy the ride, and a beer. And the countryside of Zeeland is beautiful especially when seen from the peaceful water, which is of course, a couple of meters higher than the dry land.
So here are some of the picturesques sites passed on the way, starting with the Middelburg skyline:
...followed by Veere's, where Maria and I married 14 years previously:
And so we arrived in Veere (actually not quite Veere, but a marina nearby where the crane of required capacity was located). There we left Struana moored happily disabled and Maria and I walked the fair stretch back from Veere to Oostkapelle, stopping in Vrouwenpolder on the way, enjoying the Dutch delights of Jonge Jenever and the not so Dutch but adopted Chinese-Indian cuisine. It was a nice walk ending in my mother's house. Frederik had a touch of jealousy for not having been there during the diving adventure....
The next day the prop arrived and we went back to Struana to put it on. Now assisted by Meinard (uncle) and Gerrit (cousin) this should prove a fairly manageable task. But alas! having fitted the lifting sling and while lifting Struana out the crane proved good - but not that good. The overload indicator stopped the crane dead with the saildrive only just out of the water.
So that would have to do. With a borrowed canoe and a rowing dinghy we went to work to fit the prop. This wasn't proving very satisfactory since the torque required to fit it properly was not insubstantial and why did the bloody thing fall off in the first place?? Of course because it was put on without due care, but how much care could I exercise now with wet hands lying face down on a wobbly canoe? So I was already quite sure that the holiday would only start to be relaxing again once we head Struana back into her temporary homeport of IJmuiden and that was, considering the circumstances, some distance away.
Anyway, the prop was back on, Struana back in the water, and Gerrit and I happily sailed into Veere, parking the whole lot quite decently. Joined later by Meinard, I had the best beer then, in great company.
And so we settled into a peaceful life in Veere for a few days of rest, reflection and for planning the trip back. With guests on board (friends staying with my mother) we did go for a day trip on het Veerse Meer which was very nice.
While making the small trip across het Veerse Meer I found to my dismay that there was something wrong with the steering column as using the wheel for turning more than a few degrees of rudder made quite a loud banging noise coming from the lower bearing in the vertical pedestal. To cut a long story short, the lower bearing had seized and so now we were without wheel steering and a propellor which gave me no confidence that it would actually stay on at all... Anyway, the steering was disassembled, the emergency steering was put on (which didn't fit, had to hacksaw it to give a reasonable fit), no-one could do a repair locally, so the auto-pilot would have to do most of the work on the way home.
At this point I didn't have many good words left for pretty much anything but the reality was that we did need to get back to IJmuiden, so we decided to use the 'staande masten route' which is a passage through Dutch internal waterways which can be done with the mast standing and is suitable for boats up to 2.50m draft. So we would just about be OK with our 2.30m's.
Maria and I would undertake this trip together since the kids had already made up their minds that this wasn't really a holiday for them, which made sense. So we left Veere very early on Saturday morning (a week after leaving IJmuiden) not realising that we were actually about to experience a very nice, entertaining and exciting trip. Out of het Veerse Meer was very peaceful. I decided that I would try not to use reverse gear at all so as long as we were happily motoring ahead and with the autopilot doing its work on the rudder below decks, Maria and I could happily drink tea and enjoy the Dutch countryside floating by.
And so we went, out of het Veerse Meer and on to de Oosterschelde. I remembered this as being a rough piece of water from my childhood days, but the building of dams and calm weather made it very easy to navigate. But then the engine failed... Now I can be upfront about this (in hindsight) but this was my fault. The primary filter had some air in it following incomplete 'bleeding' and so as the temperature around the engine rose, this air bubble expanded and was sucked partially into the engine. But I did not know this at the time so we raised the mainsail on the assumpion the fuel gauge was faulty and the tank was in fact empty. The nearest port which we could enter under sail and considering the state of the tide, was Wemeldingen. So there we went, also hoisting the No 1 genoa as the wind was not that able to push us across the tide fast enough to actually make it into the marina. And then of course we had to moor on sails alone. As it happened we managed to point Struana from a down wind run into the marine sharply into the wind, using the lousy emergency tiller and she stopped dead next to the jetty. All that remained was to step off and tie her up...
We borrowed some bikes from the marina, bought two jerry cans and made several trips to the local fuel station only to realise the tank was in fact still half full. This was disconcerting since even though the engine satrted fine again, I did not actually know why it had failed then. But we decided to carry on nonetheless and sure enough, more or less in the same place on de Oosterschelde we were engine-less again. This time we put up the sails and decided to just try and get as far as we could, with whatever means of propulsion we had. As it happened the engine seemed to idle OK so we would on the whole be OK maneouvring, in any case when done with care.
For what it's worth (and I think it was and remains worth something) this situation, with a dodgy prop, no wheel and an engine which could not be relied upon, does wonders for one's ability to seek 'ways out' should something go wrong, and general boat handling skills are also put to the test nicely. So as we were waiting in front of the locks at the St Phillipsdam we were always slightly upwind of a jetty against which we would be blown should we become engine-less again, and maneouvring (which was difficult also because the tiller was such a bad fit on the rudder head) had to be done with a lot of care. But we made it through the locks onto het Volkerak and we had only one more set of locks to go before Willemstad where we wanted to be that evening. So it was going fine except that we were so far behind schedule.
The sails were up, the autopilot was back on and so we eventually made to Willemstad. Unfortunately too late to still enjoy this pretty town. Also we had to leave at 5 the next morning on Sunday to ensure we would be in Amsterdam by midnight.
At 5 we did leave and the engine, lo and behold, was doing fine. Maria was still asleep below and we motored at a nice speed all the way to Dordrecht where we arrived ahead of schedule (the schedule which I had worked out would get us to Amsterdam by midnight which is the only time when the city can be crossed with a standing mast, ie when railway bridges are opened, once). We carried on through Dordrecht and into Rotterdam. Here it was windy and my confused head was wondering why the engine was now fine at the same time hoping desperately it would not fail on this rather busy waterway....
We made it passed Rotterdam and onto the smaller and rather scenic Hollandse IJssel. And that's when the engine started having problems again. We hoisted the sails but to be honest this particular waterway is not ideal for sailing a boat like Struana, in fact, the whole situation began to be rather commical. What's more, if the boat didn't start to cooperate quite soon we were approaching the final logical step -and conclusion of this story- of ramming it up the nearest dyke (which was only a few metres away, apologies for using that word in this context), stepping off and for us to walk to the nearest bar, having a nice cup of coffee followed by public transport home.
And it would appear that Struana kind of got the message. We did continue sailing, but it was a nice sail, we idled the engine through some of the towns enroute, but because we had fallen behind our schedule (meaning bridges would be open sequentially) we found ourselves having a long lunch waiting for the next bridge to open. Having done some thinking I realised that it had to be a filter problem of some description so I by-passed the primary filter and that seemed to solve the problem (which had got worse and which seemed to be definitively solved after having done this modification. I thought the filter was actually blocked with bacteria at that time).
And so we continued to Amsterdam, passing Schiphol, at times running the engine at maximum power to see if it was really capable of doing so and to catch up on some time, and we made it to Amsterdam, arriving at about 10. The bridges would start to operate at about 01:30 in the morning so Maria and I headed into town to eat. Considering all the problems, we were quite proud to have made it across Holland (& Zeeland) in 2 days. At 02:00 we were called up on the radio to get going and the various bridges which represented motorways and railway lines opened and we continued on our way. Apart from having almost been rammed by a 'platbodem' coming from port while we were entering the first lock there were no more issues that night and at 03:30 we were on the other side of Amsterdam, almost on het IJ. We slept. Till not too late in the morning, had a coffee in Amsterdam and finally headed out west again, back to IJmuiden. We were back home!
Struana was tidied up, we made a day trip to Zeist to pick up the car which had been repaired, picked up the kids in Zeeland, and were back in Zurich in no time. After an exchange of emails with X-Yachts in Denmark everything was repaired and Struana is now (at time of writing in December 2012) quietly inside where she will stay for 18 months. 2013 will be a year to focus on other 'excursions' with the family....
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