Last stop in Germany

Yesterday, we did the Küstenkanal. That is about 60 Km from Oldenburg (on the Hunte) to Dörpen (on the Dortmund - Ems Kanal). It's a pretty boring exercise: mostly as straight as an arrow, with just trees on either side and a noisy road behind the trees. The water is dirty, it's like moving through a green soup with solid bits in it. No wonder that the inlet strainer for the cooling water for the exhaust got blocked. Fortunately, this happened near the only small marina on the canal, 10Km from Dörpen, where we stopped to clean the strainer. On the Baltic, the water was crystal clear, you could see the bottom of the boat every day. The strainer was sometimes blocked by jellyfish or by seaweed although only once as bad as here (with jellyfish, in Troense).
The yacht club in Dörpen was full, as it was the day of the annual 'Hafenfest' (harbour party). But the friendly harbour master found us a place next to another guest boat. Once the kids going wild on little inflatables were done (when it got dark, actually), the party noise was not bad at all. It is getting dark quite early now, in comparison to 2 months ago in Denmark. Then we had light until close to 11pm, now we have the light on before 8!
This morning we set off relatively early, but the lock keeper at the first lock was not very helpful and made us wait for an hour:

The men in charge of the next two locks, now on the Dortmund - Ems Kanal were much more obliging. Also, this canal (actually a canalised part of the river Ems) is more attractive and not as dirty. By 2:10 we tied up in the quiet but well equipped marina at Haren (that's Haren in Germany, not the one in the Dutch province of Groningen). We are currently using the washing machine and tumble drier flat out!
Tomorrow, we will enter the Haren - Rüttenbrock Kanal and get back into the Netherlands. As always, that requires a SIM card change which may or may not be possible tomorrow. So if there is no blog post tomorrow, you know the reason!