A day in Kappeln

As mentioned in the previous post, the weather 'out there' is not all that attractive, but much more promising for a few days from tomorrow. But Maasholm, although not unpleasant, has not a great deal to offer, so we moved back up the Schlei just for a couple of miles, back to Kappeln where we also stopped a few days ago.
Kappeln is nice, the local harbour consists of 32 berths where you moor in boxes, bow to the quayside and tie onto two poles at the back. This is it, seen from the water:





And from the shore:





Looks simple, but it isn't! The water is the Schlei, a 40KM long fjord. When the winds are westerly, the water blows out of the fjord, into the Baltic. When it's an easterly, obviously the other way around. The difference in level can easily be 30cm up or down, as can be seen from the barnacles on the mooring post behind Onbekommerd:





The problem is, that all of this brings with it a pretty significant current of sometimes a knot or more (for landlubbers: a knot is a nautical mile per hour, a nautical mile is 1852m). The effect when you try to enter a box is that you are pushed sideways by say 0.5 m/sec. So you aim for the middle of the box and there is no way of avoiding being pushed onto the pole! And the slower you move forward, the worse the sideways component of your combined movement becomes..... All of this produces the "Kappeln harbour entertainment". The tourists along the boulevard stand and watch how yachts have several tries to get into the box and the boat tied up. And the successful yachtsmen run around to help others. One is only at ease when both boxes next door are occupied and there is no more risk that an unsuspecting prospective neighbour will charge into you. Fortunately, the boxes are separated by ropes to reduce the chance of damage. When we first arrived here a few days ago, we helped to provide the entertainment quite well, yesterday was a bit better, but there is no way avoiding touching the poles. Everyone does and laughs about it. Fortunately, you see little or no damage and also Onbekommerd is unscathed.

Once tied up, you can walk the old stairs into the town itself:





There is good shopping, and you also see this:





A large fish smoking outfit. We treated ourselves for lunch:





A beautiful, fat, smoked eel. Once it had been cleaned, it tasted wonderful on fresh rolls:





Now Lyn is playing the piano in the 'studio':





And I am about to clean the bilge.....

Finally, these days with on-board Internet via the iPad, communications are so easy! Apart from blog posts and emails, yesterday we communicated with Sean in London via Skype IM and with Greg in Cape Town via iMessage. It all goes over the mobile phone network, many yacht harbours advertise that they have wifi, but so far we have found that few of those work well enough to use them on board. So the iPad with the German 3G card is a blessing, it works everywhere. We get 3Gigabyte for a month for €25, I have only used 1GB so far with heavy iPad usage. The only drawback is that it won't allow VOIP (that's voice over Internet), so normal Skype does not work, only the message facility. And then there is the Kindle to read books. Yesterday, before we left Maasholm (where the wifi was good), We quickly downloaded a few books as Lyn had run out of reading material. Many books (all of Dickens' works for instance) are even free!
Modern communication devices make our way of living a lot easier.

We'll have to get a Danish card for the iPad when we get to Sönderborg tomorrow. That will be the fifth one.....