We stayed on to attend the Captains' Dinner party, that traditionally marks the end of the season for the Boat Club, and at first sat with two more of Barbara's friends, Mary and Johan. Mary is originally Irish, and so speaks English easily. We also spent some time talking with Frits van Gent, the president of the club, a retired inland cruise ship captain. His last command was a ship on the Danube, running from Passau, in Austria, down the Danube and back. We remembered seeing the piles of expensive-looking luggage piled in the square in Passau as passengers waited to board one of these ships.

Later in the evening, after the dinner, Jack and Linda moved over to sit with us, and we alternated talking and dancing until quite late -- in fact we stayed until the music stopped and the singer packed up to go home.

We also took advantage of Open Monuments Day to visit the Farnsum church. Interestingly, we found 17th century gravestones lining the walls, and learned from our friend Henk Kemminck (whom we discovered showing his church to family members) that they had been found under the modern floor when it was pulled up for repairs.

In Delfzijl we also met a Swiss coulple, Walti and Elsbeth, originally simply because Walti came by and asked if I could help with the connection between his GPS and autopilot. We would later see more of them.

We were headed west on the Eemskanaal for Groningen, the provincial capital and a university town.

The ground is sinking however, and this is a cause for concern, since a good deal of it is below sea level anyway. The local people attribute this to excessive removal of gas; perhaps they are right.

Once we were settled in Groningen, and had found the Harbormaster's office (in a marine supply store), my first concern was to rig the boat for canal cruising; we wanted to wait for as few bridges as possible.

The mast came down with no problems, as did the pylon that holds the SSB antenna, but the radar mast was a different story. The hinge had frozen, as it turned out, and broke when I tried to lower the mast, dropping it across my hand. We shall have to see if our friend Aad Heemskerk, a metal-working genius, will make us a new arrangement.

We found the town little changed, although our friend who taught at the university had retired and moved back to his native Belgium. We stopped at the Saint Anthony "guesthouse," built like many such establishments in the Netherlands, in the later 16th century to house the old people and later, plague victims.

It is in the nature of canal trips that one travels with a particular group of boats for some days; one can go only so fast, and the boats are bunched together by locks and bridge openings.

On our first day we noticed the boat Adorna, Walti and Elsbeth's boat from Delfzijl, near us in the marina, and that afternoon Walti came by to invite us for a drink. It was a very pleasant evening; they are about our age and retired, and have always had a boat of some kind. From Winterthur, near Zürich, they first kept a boat on Lake Zürich, but now keep their (larger) boat in the Netherlands and spend the summers cruising. Our conversation swung back and forth between German and French, and always very pleasantly.

The next evening we went to a restaurant we remembered from an earlier trip, in the tiny Klein Pelsterstraat, and found it as good as we had remembered.

We also went to Ikea, just around the corner from our berth (even if we had a little trouble finding the entrance), where we bought some new gear for Barbara's galley and a few other odds and ends, like candles and doormats.

The biggest problem we are finding in the Netherlands is money-related; one simply cannot pay for anything with an American credit card. Dutch bank cards are all "smart cards" with a chip, and without one, you simply have to pay in cash, and some places will not even take cash.

The Reitdiep carries almost no commercial traffic and wanders through the countryside and through sleepy small towns. Judging by its curves, it was a river, not a purpose-made canal. The bridges are all remotely controlled from a central station, and we call on the VHF:

The trip takes us just over four hours, and a little after five we are coming up on the little fishing village of Zoutkamp. A young man from the Havenmeester's office interrupts his supper to take our spring line and we do the rest. We lie on the outside of the jetty that protects the inner harbor, along with other large boats.

We stayed two nights in Zoutkamp, to give me time to explore the pretty little town and Barbara some time for some academic work.

We planned to leave on Saturday, the 20th, but that morning the fog was quite thick, and I did wonder if we would be able to go. Not having a radar makes me a little less confident in unknown water in the fog.

We moved out into the Lauwersmeer, and after being a little confused by its various arms, we found our way across to the branch of the bay that leads to the Dokkumer Diep. This arm turned out not to be very deep at all in some spots. There were buoys, but there may have been shoaling since they were set, because we (and a Swedish sailboat behind us) spent some time cruising around looking for deeper water.

It was not clear where we should go, as there is no marina as such in Dokkum, just stretches of canal where mooring is allowed. There was a note in the Almanak (the Dutch canal guide) to the effect that big deep-draft boats should lie to a wooden stage on the north side of the Woudpoortsgracht. That sounded like us, and when we arrived we saw such a landing stage, and with space on it, so that is where we went.

On Monday we learned that the bridge was fixed, but our mooring was very quiet and pleasant, and everything we needed was within easy reach, so we decided to lay over until Wednesday. That night Walti and Elsbeth came over for another pleasant evening of wine and conversation.

Well, that situation was easily controlled in the short run by turning off the valve on the tank whenever the stove was not in use, instead of relying just on the solenoid valve, but it pushed the whole propane question to the forefront.