How to navigate with google earth

CRUISING

PHOTOS: DICK DURHAM UNLESS OTHERWISE STATED

MARCH 2016 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com 39

pontoon barge supporting the legs and
control room of a 200ft high wind turbine
had to negotiate the opening ahead of us.
Pushed by one tug and pulled by another,
the crew of this complex craft played
searchlights over the upper bridgeworks,
picking out imaginative graffiti, as they
made sure their charge did not get hooked
on any girders.
Delivery lorries, their engines turned off,
stacked up each side of the bridge as the
pontoon edged through painfully slowly:
you couldn’t have slipped a Drum roll-up
paper ‘tween topside and bridgeside.
Meanwhile the breeze, increasing all the
time, kept trying to blow Urania’s head off
and Harry had to constantly edge forward
and then drop back as there was very little
room in the canal to keep the long-keel
ketch head-to-wind and yet remain on
station while carrying a touch of way.
Harry and his seven-strong crew had
taken six hours to bring the 80-ton
training ship down through 20 bridges
and two locks from her base at Den
Helder, the Royal Netherlands Navy’s
version of Portsmouth in north Holland, to
Amsterdam where I had joined her.

Caught up in heavy traffic
Urania is used mainly for training naval
midshipmen and her passage through the
canals was a useful an exercise in close-
quarters manoeuvring. Her destination
was Drimmelen, south of Dordrecht, where
a shipyard was waiting to refit her during
the winter before she begins a summer
sailing tour of England’s south coast.
‘We can make 10 knots under just yankee
and mizzen,’ said Harry, covetously, as
the wind battered the bare masts. He
squinted as the headlights of late night
traffic rounded a bend in the cobbled street
running alongside the Singelgracht Canal
and briefly took away his night vision.
Another bridge appeared and the
pontoon tow ahead slowed and, although
Urania sports a variable pitch propeller,
the prop wash of the tug ahead of us kept
throwing the ketch’s head off. We had to
stay close to the tow for fear of losing the
shoot through each bridge. As it was, the
bells announcing each span was returning
to horizontal mode would start to ring
before we were clear.
I checked the ship’s chronometer and
it was 0210 as we shaped up for the fifth
bridge of the passage. Soon we passed
through the sixth and along a canal with
houses squatting atop boatshed basements.
I even spotted a windmill’s sails black
against the glow of the city.
We motored on between Rembrandt and
Vondel Parks as Amsterdam’s metropolis
gave way to more open ground. By 0325
we had cleared the city limits and took a
turn alongside the canal wall once more
to await the opening of the A10 motorway
ring around Amsterdam. Before we got to
it, there was yet another lock, whose
keepers were keen to pack us in astern

‘ You could not have slipped a Drum roll-up

paper ’tween topside and bridgeside’

PHOTO: COURTESY ROYAL NETHERLANDS NAVY

All lifting bridges show a green ‘traffic’ light when the span is clear of your rig

‘Room for one more?’ Dekkers deftly

squeezes Urania into yet another lock

Urania approaches Rembrandt and Vondel

parks, before reaching Schiphol airport

Amsterdam sleeps while

Urania slips silently by

bound for Dordrecht