The Adventure begins (or does it?)

The fine weather continued to hold for the first half of this week with only a couple of damp days before the next high has placed itself over the Netherlands. We spent Monday in Langweer a lovely small village on the edge of a small meer (see picture of us moored up for lunch in the area). Then on Tuesday it was time to head back towards our home base of Ossenzijl. We headed down the Prinses Magriet Kanaal to Lemmer onto the Ijsselmeer, the vast inland sea that dominates this part of the Netherlands. We didn't go far as we turned into another Canal and headed along the Lemmervaart to Blokzijl where we had hoped to spend the night. Unfortunately we ran into a bridge (not literally!) that was not opening for a while because it was car rush hour. So we decided to tie up at Vollenhoven which was an equally quaint town (see picture of us moored there).

It had been a long day so we decided to eat ashore but nothing much was open, so we bought two delicious pizzas and ate them back on the boat with a lovely bottle of Merlot. Next day we arrived back at Ossenzil mid afternoon hopefully to find everything ready for the installation of batteries and other minor repair work, but alas nothing had been organized. A bit of coaxing later we were promised installation would start the enxt day. When they came to install the batteries they decided they couldn't add two more batteries as there was not enough space, so we agreed to replace the batteries with two bigger and better ones. But of course they were not in stock so we had to wait for Friday to get them installed, which they duly were.

Friday we celebrated the end of the repairs and made ready to depart the following day. It was raining on Saturday so we waited until it had eased after lunch and headed out onto the channel and went North West to the Tjeukemeer. Unfortunately about 2 km away the engine suddenly died. The wind was strong. There were boats to the left of us; boats to the right of us and
rocks all around. We drifted onto a shallow muddy bit of canal and I lifted the hatches to have a look. It sounded like a diesel fuel problem so I played around with the valves and filters and eventually managed to get it going again, but we decided to head back to home base and get it checked out. When the engineer came to look it was beyond his experience as all the
other engineers were off that day. But he did find a small leak in the exhaust pipe water cooling that he said needed repair before we could leave and so of course we have to wait until Monday for that to be done and hope the required parts are in stock and not 3 days wait more.

We filled in the time on Sunday with a late breakfast of bacon and eggs and went for a long walk in a National Park that is just across the road called the Weerribben. It is old peat diggings that have been left for the wildlife and in typical Dutch fashion they have created a network of walking, biking and boating tracks through the park. We didn't see much wildlife but it was
a good walk in the fresh air.