Rex, who is normally up and about by 6am, was still in bed at 8am. I wondered if he was ill, or perhaps he had been eating bread and butter all night and was now sleeping it off. I decided not to disturb his sleep; he resembled a little cherub with his face poking out of his duvet.
I headed off to pay our dues to the harbourmaster, an attractive young woman who insisted I write out all the boat details as well as my details. Why she wanted my inside leg measurements I'll never know.
 Ijmuiden Marina from the Air |
His boat was a Bavaria, which he had purchased brand new. He used to keep it at Levington, but was now based in Titchmarsh marina. Good luck there I thought. He and his crew, a bloke from Diss, were on their annual one week sailing trip. On this occasion, they had sailed from Titchmarsh to Lowestoft, and made the crossing to Ijmuiden from there.
His story started to unfold. The crossing took place a few days earlier, and it was during this trip across the North Sea that disaster struck. The water pump on their engine broke, and they were soon up to their ankles in water. The rest of the trip involved sailing only and constant bailing. The pair were now awaiting a marine engineer to swap the broken pump with a new one, and were having a job trying to tie the engineer down to a specific time.
The fellow then launched into lengthy tales of how he had experienced pump problems before. Soon I was being drowned in his life history. He had a disabled daughter, and the rest of his family lived in Miami. After over half an hour of a torrent of drivel, I was drifting into overload, so I did the only thing I could do and wished him success with his engine and I a safe journey and fair winds to the both of them.
 Only on the North Sea Canal |
We decided to plough ahead to Amsterdam, from where we could leap off to the far reaches of the Ijsselmeer. I took the precaution of booking over the phone a berth there for the night. Whilst doing this, two men on the adjacent boat surfaced into their cockpit. They were en route, sailing down from Helsinki to the Mediterranean, where their wives would meet up with them. They were particularly interested in discussing the intricate details of boats, so I left Rex to it. Soon he was regaling them of our passage through Helsinki in 2011, when we got caught up in all the partying afoot as the Finnish ice hockey team toured the city in an open top bus, celebrating their victory in the 2011 IIHF World Championship Final. The match was played at the Orange Arena in Bratislava, Slovakia on 15th May between Sweden and Finland. Finland won the match 6-1 and became world champions for the first time since the 1995 tournament, and for the second time in history. This match was Finland's first final since 2007 and Sweden's first final since 2006.
After Rex was showered, we wasted no time casting off in order to head to the lock where we would gain access to the North Sea Canal. First we refuelled, then headed out of the marina, and motored past the Ijmondhaven where a large cruise ship was berthed, aptly name Costa Fortuna.
Then "disaster" struck, an alarm wailed out from our boat for a few seconds, then stopped. A short while later this was repeated. It was an ear piercingly loud noise, and we definitely did not want to proceed with such a din. We wanted to urgently investigate what the issue was. The major issue at that point in time was trying to ascertain where the noise was coming from, difficult to do when it is intermittent. It seemed to be in the vicinity of the port side of the cockpit door. Here resided several instruments. In turn we switched off the VHF radio, the gas alarm, and I even took the security alarm apart. No joy, so we proceeded with disabling the chart plotter and autopilot, and eliminated the smoke alarm. Still the wailing persisted. It seemed as if the noise was emanating from the cockpit outside, but there was nothing out there to generate the din.
Meanwhile we were surrounded by all manner of boats, ships, barges and tugs whizzing past us, and on top of that Ijmuiden was hosting a Festival of the Sea, and a parade of ancient vessels was steaming past us too. This all reminded me very much of the Benny Hill sketches I used to watch when I was a child. Not only were we chasing around like headless chickens trying to resolve our siren problem; Rex was fuming because we had missed the lock opening. In a moment of sanity we decided to head back to the marina to get to the bottom of this incessant alarm.
It was then that we spotted, under a T-shirt on one of the cockpit seats, the Ipad, the very same device we brought along to use as a backup navigational aide. It was small and couldn't possible generate such a loud noise - could it? I took the innocent looking Ipad and placed it under a duvet. Surprisingly the sound was now muffled. It was indeed the culprit. It appeared that the navigation software was flagging up an alarm associated with other vessels in close proximity, and we couldn't immediately figure a way of cancelling it. We took the obvious step and switched the Ipad off. Peace at last.
After a lot of cursing in fluent Dutch, we headed back up to the lock, and soon we were chasing barges and avoiding cruise ships on the North Sea Canal.
We arrived at the Amsterdam Marina long after the harbour master had gone home, but he had already informed us of our berth for the night. Rex did a superb insertion of Duonita into the narrow berth we had been allocated.
 Celebrity Apex Cruise Ship Passing Amsterdam Marina |
The last 36 hours had been fairly hectic, and we were still a bit tired, so we didn't explore the city much. An open air bar on a large bridge over a canal magically appeared before us. We needed no invitation, we were soon sipping a couple of beers and people watching. Suitably refreshed, we located a decent Italian restaurant and enjoyed some good food before heading back to the boat for a welcome sleep.