Strangely enough, the journey is the journey on transit days.
My favorite thing about cruising in Nederlands might actually be the part where we fire up the engine, push off the dock (usually with the bow thruster, who knew!?!), and get moving towards somewhere else.
If you’ve done ocean or coastal cruising, you already know that the part where you are underway is not the part that you are onboard for primarily; it just doesn’t work that way, especially sailing. Too many factors like heel angle, weather offshore, the chance of breakage offshore, all the stuff that causes you to want to get where you are going as fast as you can, with very few exceptions, just kind of melts away on a canal cruiser.
The sightseeing is nothing short of magnificent!
I would say the fastest you’ll ever cruise in NL is maybe 11 or 12 km/hr over the ground. Most of the boats don’t have a speedometer (ours was ‘uninstalled; and sits coiled up under the galley floorboard) so you get the GPS speed from Waterkaarten or your GPS or some other app, and that’s your point of relevance. Now that I think about it, I’m not actually sure whether the speed limit signs in NL are for SOW or SOG… I suppose I will have to ask a waterreicht next year when we are back.
It’s WAY more likely that you’re motoring along at somewhere between 5 and 9 kmh – that’s ~3 to 5.5 MILES per hour if you’re curious – and it’s the most amazing slow trip EVER! One moment you’re cruising through farmland that smells of cows and their cow patties, then 10 minutes later you are literally putt-putting along through a neighborhood and you can see in all the living rooms along the canal (very Dutch thing, leaving the living room curtains open, more on that in another post).
You’ll definitely come to a bridge or a lock (or both), and maybe the bridge tender is on lunch break or the A5 bridge doesn’t open again until the commute traffic time is over and you are too tall to pass without it being opened; no matter how you look at it, the actual act of going from one place to another is absolutely mesmerizing, at least most of the time.
I spent a couple of transit days down below, cleaning and sorting and so on, but the boat is chock full of windows everywhere so I still got a good view of what was going on when I chose to look up, and then of course there are parts of the trip where I don’t want to be anywhere but upstairs, outside, checking out everything going on.
So many different kinds of bridges…
Tended bridges, toll bridges, camerabewaking bridges, push button bridges, drawbridges, swing bridges, bascule bridges, manned locks, unmanned locks, it’s mind boggling the relationship that the Dutch have with water and waterways, and even more incredible when you think about the fact that so much of the country used to be under water.
My favorites are the toll bridges. Not because I like paying to go through a bridge, but because I like catching the klompen and dropping the coins in when the tender swings it out to collect.
