2nd May 2016
Haarlem to Alkmaar

Another lovely sunny day. We made it through Haarlem´s 9 bridges in good time. I had to hop ashore between Nos. 5 & 6 to pay the bruggeld of 10 euros at the pay machine. That covered the charge for all 9 bridges. We should have paid the other day when we came the other way, but hey ho, did´nt know.

It cost 10 euro for a boat our size to pass through Haarlem´s bridges.

The shower block in Haarlem - inside the windmill!

We were´nt on the Noordzee canal long, thank goodness, because sharing a waterway with huge ships does make me nervous. We passed through one of the oldest and cutest locks in the Netherlands to get into the Nauernasche Vaart - according to the very chatty lock keeper, it was built in 1672 - although presumably fixed up along the way. His name is Gerrit Mooi and he is an artist as well as a lock keeper. He told us he had a web page with pictures of his work, but I can´t find it. 

The jolly lock keeper.

We had to stop briefly at a yacht club in the Alkmaar lake to exchange the galley gas bottle and fill up with water. Finding places to exchange bottles is not so easy. Most places don´t have them. The yacht club had the wrong size bottles, but luckily a chap on a nearby boat had a full one of the size we wanted and he let us have his. Phew. I would have had to do without coffee otherwise and skip would have had to suffer as a result ;)

                          It did make us look twice!


There are very few places to moor in Alkmaar, we discovered, and they were all full. We eventually tied up on the waterpoint dock which was in a really good spot, but not actually allowed. Oh well, no one turned up to chase us off, so we stayed there the night. Not overly impressed with the town. All the usual shops and a mish mash of new and old buildings. The most interesting part was the carpark outside the Jumbo supermarket where there were black coffin shapes all over the place. I found a board which explained that when they were repaving it, they came across both prehistoric burials as well as a couple of mass graves from a sixteenth century spanish siege. The coffin shapes indicate where the burials were found.

Probably the evening drizzle did´nt help our impression of the town....

Waiting at the railway bridge. Later, we "caught" the Intercity :)