Offshore North Sea passage | Sailing Florence - Ep.234

Finally there is a weather window to sail across the North Sea towards the Baltic, just not via the route that we had intended. Crossing the North Sea there is plenty to keep us on our toes, from dodging shipping lanes to tacking between oil rigs and obstacles in the dark. We're just heading out of the river Orwell and we're en route to Germany across a section of the North Sea that we've never sailed before, although we've been up down and across a couple of times. We've never sailed this particular section and the reason that we're heading to Germany is because the wind has been blowing from the northeast for the last week, which is why we've been waiting in the river Orwell, and there's just a tiny small window of opportunity for us to head towards the Baltic. So we're not going to have time to sail around the northern tip of Denmark like we'd intended to, but there is a shortcut through the Kiel Canal in Germany, so that's where we're heading and it looks like we're going to get hopefully a fairly fast sail there, but there are some challenges for that section of the North Sea. The North Sea is known not just for its short sharp sea state, but also for being full of oil and gas rigs to avoid and a huge amount of shipping. A lot of that shipping is going to be going the same direction as us going to the Kiel Canal or coming from the Kiel Canal, so we're going to have to keep a really good lookout for ships and we've got to cross those very busy shipping lanes on this leg, but I'm really looking forward to going through the Kiel Canal. It wasn't on the plan for the way into the Baltic, but we've just been looking at a few things. Amy's been doing a bit of research and it looks actually a lot more picturesque along it than I thought it was going to be, so hopefully that'll be a really good decision to go through there. We're timing our exit from the river Orwell here to go with the tide, so the tide is about to change out of the entrance and that's why we're leaving now. It's a little bit light on the wind side at the moment, which is why we're motoring down the river, but that should kick in once we get just offshore. To Germany! Germany, here we come. What's good in Germany? Sausages? Bread. Bread? Very good in Germany. Beer. Oh beer, yeah that'll be good. Arrival beer will mean something a bit different. Yeah. There you go. Just whilst we're putting the pole out and paying attention to ourselves, we realised we were going to head on with a barge coming the other way, so just heading up to go port to port with him. No harm done. There we go, safely head down now. Plenty of room, it's just approaching very quickly. Even though being under sail means we have a stand-on vessel and the barge should avoid us, we always prefer to take our destiny in our own control and alter course to keep clear ourselves when there's a clear option to do so. There's a fairly early departure, so breakfast on the way. After waiting through a week of northwesterly winds in the river Orwell, it looks like we should now experience downwind or reaching conditions all the way to the river Elbe, where we will enter the Keel Canal. It's been a very uneventful day so far. We've had to drive a couple of times because the wind's a little bit shifty, but we've barely seen any ships. In fact it's been so relaxed that we've just taken it in turns to have a snooze. I think when you're sailing it's one of the few times that you really get a guilt-free afternoon nap, so you've got to take advantage of it. But we're just now coming up to the southern end of a wind farm or a gap between two wind farms which is squeezing a bit of the traffic, so there's a little bit more going on. A few ships out here and and just one other sailing boat, but at the moment it all seems like there's big enough space between everything. Despite the calm winds, we found ourselves rolling around in a typical confused North Sea sea state, making preparing dinner more of a challenge. But in anticipation of just this situation, I'd done most of the preparation before we left the river. I've just come off watch and Matt's taken over so I get to go to bed for a little bit. It was a fairly straightforward watch, not as much shipping as I expected and the wind has now switched around so we're more on a reach, so it's much more comfortable with the sea state. The sea state seems a bit less confused, so I hopefully should get a couple of hours sleep ready to cross the shipping lanes in the morning. Well, the wind's completely died on us. I don't know if you can see the big black cloud behind us, which I think has stolen the wind. We've been doing well up until now and we've chosen this point to cross the shipping lanes. So we've just turned the motoring now because there's no wind and that's a good time to turn 90 degrees and cross directly across the shipping lanes, so we cross them just like we're crossing a road. There's not too much traffic at this point, but it's a similar crossing. We only look left and right, but then luckily we've also got AIS on the chart plotter which really helps to understand how fast the ships are going and where the gaps in between them are and where we're going to be in say half an hour's time because it's about five, I think it's about actually about eight or nine miles across here, so it takes an hour and a half of motoring to cross shipping lanes and then hopefully some wind will come back in, but I'm not too confident in that. I think we might be motoring for a little bit now, but it's beautiful out here. Sea state's easing off. It's beautiful and sunny. Can't complain. Well, but you can complain because there's no wind. Maybe that black cloud over there will bring wind. Well sure enough the front edge of that rain cloud is bringing wind, so we've got 18 knots of wind suddenly, which means we can turn the engine off because we can sail faster than we can motor in these conditions, which is good because it gets us across the shipping lanes a bit quicker and there was a big ship coming towards us. That's going to go safely behind us and then we've got another one which is going to get into the middle of the central reservation and then cross the second side, second lane, so yeah with a bit of breeze we can sail at six, six and a half knots instead of motoring at sort of five knots, so that really helps, but it's also going to bring rain so we might be putting the tent back on in a minute. Well I'd rather have wind and rain than sun and wind, to be honest. So here we are, second evening at sea. Very different to the first. The wind has disappeared and the sea state has calmed down massively. We've only got about five and a half knots of wind, but with this calm sea state Florence is just ghosting along. It's also shifted around. It's not doing what it was forecast to do when we left. It was forecast to be downwind or a reach all the way, it's just turned around to be blowing dead on the nose, so we're going to be zigzagging, tacking up along the shore of Netherlands through the night until we reach Germany. It wasn't in the plan and the light winds and the fact we're going to have to zigzag does mean we're going to arrive 12 hours later than we thought we would, but that's sailing. You can never really plan what's going to happen. It all depends on the weather. It's much more pleasant than being thrown around like we were last night though. Should be a nice calm night for sleeping apart from the fact that the boat will be tacking, so we might get tipped out of our bunk if we get a little bit of breeze. It may well be fairly upright. Since it is light winds and we're sailing with the genoa, I'm pulling the staysail back to the mast so it is out of the way. Then we can easily tack the genoa without having to furl it first. Dawn on day three found us close reaching along the coast of northern Germany. The wind had shifted through the night so we were no longer having to tack, but could instead head directly for the mouth of river Elbe in Germany, which is where we want to go. What a difference a day makes. Last night on my night watch I was beating upwind in a really narrow gap between the shipping lanes, a load of inshore traffic, some oil rigs, a big drilling ship, I think it was even fishing boats, sailing boats, there was a lot going on. It was actually quite a watch because sometimes the time during a night watch can drag on a little bit, but today is totally different. Had rain last night, today we've got sunshine, sailing dead downwind, and we're finally heading up the river that we're going to to Kruxhaven, which is going to be hopefully our first stop in Germany, where we'll be able to check in, get a beer, and the plan is hopefully to just stay one night in Kruxhaven and then head over to Brunsvottel, sorry if I murdered that, and that's the start of the Kiel Canal. So different to when we made landfall in Norway about this time last year, and here you've got to be very close to the shore before you can even see it because it's so low-lying, and it just looks like it's one magnificent beach. It's been going on for miles. We've got full sail up here and Florence is doing great. We're doing seven knots through the water, but we've got just over two knots of tide against us. When we originally did the planning, it looked like it was all going to work perfectly. We're going to arrive here at the entrance to the river at the slack tide just before it starts coming in, but because the weather changed and we had to do that beating along the shore last night, it slowed us all down, and now we've got the opposite. So we've got the tide absolutely rushing out against us. There's lots of yachts using that tide to come out, but we are fighting against it to go in, but luckily there is enough wind we can force our way over the tide. Okay, ready? Yeah. Let's go for it. Okay, ready? After three days at sea and successfully dodging all of the traffic in the river, we were very happy to pull into Cuxhaven Marina for a full night's sleep before sailing on to the Keel Canal. Well, that has to be one of the easiest check-ins ever. We found our berth in the marina and it was literally 10 minutes to walk across, no queue, get a passport stamped and we're checked in. So we can take down the yellow quarantine flag and put up a German courtesy flag. Next time we take our little Florence through the world's busiest canal and have to get much closer to all those ships. For extra updates in between these bi-weekly videos and to find out what we're up to in real time, head over to Patreon and join the crew. Continuing our voyage on Florence would not be possible without the support of our patrons. Thank you to all of you and especially to our star patrons.