Tuesday 4th May / Wednesday 5th May 2004 Almere Haven.

Tuesday 4th May 2004 Almere Haven.

Lagevaart (pictures from Aug 2005)

6.5 C Grey, showery and windy with heavy rain later. Mike took Bill by car to find the place on the map (from our neighbours) in Almere Buiten. It turned out to be a yacht chandler’s and repair depot and he hadn’t got any steel section, but said he could bend some strips cut from sheet may be in a couple of days, they said thanks but no. They gave up and went in an tourist information place were the assistants were very helpful and searched the internet for steel stockholders. They found a steel fabricator’s and Mike drove back almost next door to the chandler’s! The guy had got exactly what they needed, the right size and wall thickness of square steel tube and he agreed to cut it to the correct length. Excellent, it saved welding angles together. On their return, Mike and Bill set to work to bolt the box section in place of the R&D engine mounts. If the solid mounts were successful they could be welded in later, if not they could be removed and replaced with harder mounts.

Wednesday 5th May 2004 Almere to KP 40.

Lagevaart  (pictures from Aug 2005)

8.6° C Overcast, cloudy with sunny spells and a chilly wind. Set off at 9.00 a.m. with the pins in to do some washing. Found the “Green Cathedral” marked on the charts. Now it has an information board and a length of wooden edged mooring it was easy to spot. The profile of the shape of a church had been planted with poplar trees, better to be seen in plan by aircraft. Bad smells were coming off the field on our right hand side. A tractor, adjacent to us to start with, was spreading really foul smelling liquid on the field. It was going in the same direction as us but just a touch faster - for the next 3 kms! A big field! We tried very hard to breathe as little as possible. Put a second load of washing in the machine and made a cup of soup to keep out the chill. We passed some very large orchards surrounded by wind breaking tree hedges, blossom still covering the fruit trees. As we came to an area called Trekkersveld, I counted

Almere Buiten Lagevaart  (pictures from Aug 2005)

fifty wind generators, each one spinning in the strong wind, all spread out across the farmland on our left hand side. Two small cruisers were moored by the Knarsdijk which divides the two Flevoland polders, east and south. One cruiser was in a small layby in an adjoining canal and the other was moored next to a slipway. The washing finished at midday just as we went under the guillotine gates in the dijk. We drifted to uncouple the generator and Bill also paused to get his lunch. Lots of bank work was going on as we continued along the canal. Diggers had been scraping the banks making extra areas of water behind the original wooden bank edges. We expected this to be for additional wildlife habitat (as if there weren’t enough wet areas on Flevo with all the canals and drainage channels, ponds and pools!) We saw what appeared to be a dredging boat unloading sand at the junction with the canal which runs down to Harderwijk and now connects with the Randmeer at Lovink, where there is a new lock called De Blauwe Dromer. They had prepared more holes behind the original bank edges and now we wondered if this was for emptying dredgings! It was 1.15 p.m. when we moored at the western end of the empty moorings at KP 40 (middle of nowhere) with two fishermen at the far end. (Note: There was a specially prepared fishing place less than two hundred metres from the mooring area but everyone knows the fish prefer to be by boats!) Bill gave us hand to unload the moped and Mike went back to Almere to collect the car and move it on to Ketelhaven. The two fishermen left and were soon replaced by a cruiser. It was too windy for a BBQ and the temperature was dropping fast again so Mike lit the central heating.