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The trip seemed to require an interminable amount of planning!
To begin with the trip was brocken up into three parts: 1) Lymington to Ijmuiden 2) Ijmuiden to Kiel 3) Kiel to Gothenburg
The plan was to get into the Baltic as soon a possible and not to be tempted by any cruising in the Netherlands.
We decided that the 25th should be the arrival day in Gothenburg (26th being midsummer festivities in Sweden)
Being 'lazy', I mean using all available resources to make passage plans, Neptune Passage Planner was purchased to take the 'hassle' out of tide predictions. This showed us that we could do it in 12days at a pinch with three overnight passages. So we built in a couple of days contingency and decided to leave on the 9th June.
The first leg passes the French, Belgian and Dutch coasts. Not very interesting for cruising so two night passages we arranged.
The second leg will take us around the Frisian Islands and through the Kile canal to the Baltic. Much to see and much to delay us if the weather is bad. This area of coastline is bounded by sandy shallows and the TTS making the passage very weather dependent. Indeed , having looked at various accounts of passages made by other yachts, the Elbe looked particularly prone to possible delays as we were going to be there at Spring tide.
Going around Holland though there are at least two other options: Going inside the Frisian's - very dependent on tides to 'ride' the sand bars, and going though the canals. Fortunately there are a couple of good canal connections that don't require the mast to be taken down. In theory we could go all the way from Rotterdam to the Eems river by canal and then outside the Frisian Islands to the Elbe.
There is a third option and that would go - from West Terschelling outside the TTS to Heligoland and enter the Elbe from there.
As far at the Baltic was concerned we did no real planning. As we were not sure ho much time we would have, the mass of ports/marinas available in Denmark and the general 'easy' sailing conditions, we though there was little point it going into too much detail for this leg. Just some web browsing to get an idea of what possibilities there were.
Charts need to be collected and we will take the IMARY passage planning charts up to Cuxhaven in Germany. For more detail we have the latest Admiralty coastal charts around Holland with all the corrections. It appears that not to have these bang up to date can lead to both practical problems and financial ones courtesy of the Dutch Coast Guard who can fine boats.
The last item on the planning list was 'Fuel'. Courtesy of the RYA we found that there are all sorts of documentation required to have a hope of not being fined a considerable amount of money for having RED diesel in our tank! This includes written proof that one of the crew members had actually made the purchase of RED diesel himself. (Nice little earner for the authorities)
