Groningen and Delfzijl

We left our quiet mooring 'in the wild' and motored up the Princes Margriet kanaal and the Van Starckenborgh kanaal towards Groningen. Usually, these canals are very busy with commercial traffic, but as it was a public holiday it was relatively quiet. The canalside was very pretty:





We spent the night in Groningen and the following morning went shopping at the market. Dutch markets have lots of stalls selling cheeses, fruit, vegetables, fish and meat. This in addition to items of clothing and haberdashery (I love that word!).









We are planning ahead for a few months outside the Netherlands and one thing that has not been planned by the EU is gas bottle connections. So we need sufficient supplies of 'Dutch gas' to survive a few months. In addition, the somewhat over ambitious safety regulations make it more and more difficult to sell gas bottles, with the result that it is not so easy to find a retailer on the water. After a bit of phoning around we located one in Delfzijl, which was our next stop.

Once we had the gas bottle (we now have two, with a total of 21 kegs of propane which - from experience - should last 14 weeks) we went through the lock onto salt water:






In the yacht harbour, we met Hans and Jet, with whom we'll spend the next few weeks on the German Wadden islands.

This is their boat, the 'Waterbufvel':




(Hans and I went to get diesel).

We spent the evening planning tomorrow's trip, to Greetsiel on the German mainland:





I am not sure when next we'll be able to update the blog. Up till now, I have used the 3G facility of the iPad to do these posts if there is no WiFi available, but I need to get a German 3G card to do this from tomorrow. It is not clear if a 3G card can be obtained in a small place like Greetsiel. We'll update as soon as we can though.

Location:Handelskade West,Delfzijl,The Netherlands