Dan Helder, Netherlands to Hamble, UK

This was the longest passage so far on this journey but we needed to do it (you guessed it!) to get ahead of yet another gale building and forecast to hit the North Sea and English Channel. What is it with 'summer' in northern Europe? I thought in late July and August it would be the best weather of the entire year to do a transit. But we've been held up by gale after gale coming about every three days for our entire journey from Sweden.

Also gone are my visions of cruising fiords and lovely coastlines. Thanks to Global Warming, we have to dodge hundreds of ineffcient, expensive bird killers (aka windmill farms) strewn haphazardly off the coastline of the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK. We saw that less that 5% of the windmills blades were turning. We found out later that if the wind is too high, they sht them down. Either they all were broken or they can't handle more than 20kts of breeze. Stupid! I read that even more will be built by the UK. What a incredible waste! Then there are hundreds of freighters waiting to get into Rotterdam and other large ports that are anchored off the coast as well. An interesting 'obstacle course'.

The only plus side to the passage was that it was challenging to navigate around all this mess at night using the radar and binoculars. It was especially fun to navigate the Solent, past the Ile of Wight and up the Hamble River to our berth arriving at 02:00 after almost 41 hours. Boy, we were tired!