If our travels from here on are to make any sense, I must first say a little bit about the geography of the southern third of the Netherlands. This area is essentially the delta formed by two great rivers, the Rhine and the Meuse, with the Scheldt thrown in on the southern end for good measure. There is a map that may help with this description.

The real Meuse runs north through France and Belgium and along the Dutch side of the German border until it turns west just south of Nijmegen and flirts with the remainder of the Rhine at Zaltbommel. It continues southwest until losing its identity in the swamps of the Biesbosch, becoming the Amer, and flowing out into the vast estuary Hollands Diep.

The main stream of the Rhine becomes the Waal at Nijmegen, but later becomes various species of Merwede ("Upper," "Lower," "New") and splits, part of it going on to Dordrecht, and part southwest to Hollands Diep. At Dordrecht, most of the Merwede goes on, now as the Oude Maas (the "Old Meuse"), to join Rotterdam Harbor west of the city, while a canal branches off as simply Noord to join the Lek where it becomes the Nieuwe Maas.

Soon enough, we were through the bridge (which is only 7.7 meters wide) and secured in the harbor, which is mostly populated by larger classic boats.

We lay over two days in Dordrecht, then, on Monday, September 21st, headed out through the Boombrug. This bridge is essentially a blind alley, with very poor sightlines in either direction. We had advised Dordrecht Control by radio, and they held us in the bridge approach, still half in the open drawbridge, until a ship passed in front of our nose, and then allowed us to cross and turn left for the Dordtse Kil.

This part of Dordrecht is very industrial, with big-ship harbors, full of cranes, but soon the Kil became more rural and we were again running through meadows full of cows.

Barbara romped thorugh the chop, and soon it was time to turn into the harbor at Willemstad. We had called ahead, but it was not clear, either from the charts or the descriptions in the Water Almanac, just where we should go, so we followed the buoys cautiously into the harbor mouth, wondering if we should turn to the right or the left into one of the Jachthavens. As we wondered, however, a figure appeared on the deck of the Harbor Office and waved us on, into the innermost harbor, where we found a space just our size on the quay in front of the town, exactly the kind of spot we like.

We walked around the town, and had a good dinner at "El Miguel" the night of our arrival. The next day was a rainy Sunday, and we did some sightseeing betweeen the showers and filled our water tanks. We were interested in the Koepelkerk, built in 1607 as the first Protestant church built in the Netherlands.

The German Army took over Willemstad in the spring of 1940 and mined the harbor entrance. Later that year, an inland ship carrying Belgian POWs toward Germany ran onto a mine and sank, killing everyone aboard. The recovered bodies are buried in a special cemetery next to the harbor.

We had about a seven mile run, through the gray, flat, fenlands of North Brabant, before we reached the left turn into the Schelde-Rijnverbindung, the Rhine-Scheldt Connecting Canal. This trip pointed up a weakness of our chart- plotting program, "PC- Navigo." It is very good at finding routes through the canals, and quite informative, but does not allow waypoints, and we would have been glad of a few in this feature-poor landscape.

Meanwhile, I worked on the boat, doing preventive maintenance on the engine in preparation for the crossing, and trying to coax better performance from the Hurricane heater. This had worked flawlessly all winter, but now, when we would have liked some heat to cheer us up on gray rainy days, refused to burn properly. The wood stove worked fine, of course, and Barbara had good luck in finding wood from someone who was remodeling an old building, and from a worker in the yard who was tearing some old oak out of a boat to do some kind of refit, but the heater would really have helped. When it works, it is great, but it seems to be somehow delicate, as though the margins are small, and although I cleaned everything in sight, and replaced some key parts, a proper flame just could not be made to last very long. If it does not do better after being spoken to at home by someone who really knows these systems, it will be time to find a different solution to the heat problem.

Barbara, in particular, met many people, among them a lawyer who was turning a 17th-century house, that had been used by a bank, back into a house again. A major concern was what to do with all the safe-deposit boxes. She also met a very pleasant Belgian family, Jan and Françoise, living aboard their small tjalk. As we met them, their two sons had come to help sail the boat back to Belgium for the winter, so they were a little crowded but very cheerful.

Barbara had one interesting surprise; when she went to what she thought would be a simple concert, she found that it was really a gathering of church choirs from all over the region, assembled for a recording session. Barbara was welcome to attend, but was expected to sing, which was no problem of course. The outcome was to be a new Christmas CD, to be sold for the benefit of Syrian refugees.

From Tholen, it is possible to go to Antwerp by a protected canal, passing by Bergen op Zoom and through the Kreekrak Locks, but we did not want to go to Antwerp. Instead, we turned right at the end of the Rhine-Scheldt Canal into the equally large Bergse Diep Locks, that matched the water level of the tide and released us into the Eastern Scheldt.

Here, we joined the parade of sea-going ships headed out to sea from Antwerp, and stayed well out of the way of the inbound procession. Every part of this estuary has a name; we ran east of the flats of the Rug van Baarland into the sweeping westerly curve of the Gat van Ossenisse.

The flooding tide held us up a little, but the distance was again not great, and in something over an hour we made up the entrance to Terneuzen Harbor. Here the tide was an issue, sweeping past the harbor entrance and leaving whirlpools in its wake. We had to time our turn to avoid the oncoming traffic and still miss the mudbanks on either side of the moles protecting the harbor.

This attribution appears to go back to Frederick Marryat, the early 19th-century naval officer, writer of sea stories, and friend of Charles Dickens.

Marryat did not invent the core of the story, but he did localize the captain as Willem van der Decken, living in a house on the Havenstraat ("Harbor Streeet") in Terneuzen with his wife and children, and in Terneuzen the legend is treated as Gospel.

Marryat's book is called The Phantom Ship, but there have been many other versions of the story, most notably, perhaps, the opera Der fliegende Holländer ("The Flying Dutchman"), by the young Richard Wagner. In the opera, but not Marryat's novel, the unnamed Dutchman is saved at the last moment by a selfless act of love.

It is perhaps also appropriate that the planes of KLM, the Royal Dutch Airline, all carry the motto: "The Flying Dutchman."