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Leg 14 Rendsburg to Den Helder
2 to 12 September
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Skipper Jean Rehill
Crew John Holland, John and Stephanie Wilson,
Antionette Egan, Lindsey Metcalfe
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We started from Rendsburg on the Kiel Canal in fine sunny weather and familiarised ourselves with the Inland Water signs along the way. There was a fly past by four German helicopters making several passes under a couple of bridges. Another memory of this trip was the flies that eventually turned even our most gently vegetarian into a maniacal fly killer.
The weather was kind to us and we motor sailed from Cuxhaven to Helgoland on Saturday without any incident on the way apart from some Germans skinny swimming. In Helgoland we were rafted sixteen boats out with a further boat on our outside. All was fine, apart from the effort of getting ashore, until the following morning when we were alerted to the fact that we had been cast adrift on an island mini raft of four boats. We raised our kedge anchor that had been put down to keep the raft steady and were pulled back to the main raft of boats. Our German neighbour had given us a translation of the weather forecast which indicated nothing untoward. We set off but the fog closed in and lasted all day. We set bow watches of twenty to thirty minutes or until the crew were seeing big blocks of flats, Spanish villas or big white rabbits coming towards them. The fog was only at a low level and it was so bright that we needed to wear sunglasses. Our term for this was luminous fog. 
We stopped in Norderney and then went on to Borkum where two of the crew hired bikes and got the hang of the back peddling brakes only after a spectacular dive into a bush. Our longest trip of 89 miles from Borkum to West Terschelling was fraught in the final run in because several buoys between the islands of Veiland and West Terschelling were not shown on the chart. This made the navigation ‘interesting’. Thank goodness for GPS. When dusk came, identification of the buoys was made easier from a distance by the light sequences. Never the less it took great concentration to follow the channel and find the entrance to West Terschelling. Well done, everyone and in particular Lindsey who was navigating that day.
We spent a day in West Terschelling and found what the crew named as Jean’s Garden, Echo’s of a former East Coast Rally were invoked!
The weather forecast was for up to force 7 winds. After talking to a local sailor, we decided to leave a day early and make passage outside the islands to Den Helder which was a longer trip but preferred to the passage inside the islands.
The final night’s sleep was disturbed by much buffeting from the strong winds that made it necessary to secure further lines during the night. We returned to Amsterdam airport, via the excellent Netherlands bus and train service and then to Stansted.
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