The rain, it raineth every day ...

This will be a short blog post. The main thing to report is that it rains a lot in Holland: it rained all last night and all day today, so far. The locals blame the British – after all, the UK sits to the west of Holland, and that’s where the weather is coming from. We just keep hoping for sunshine one day soon.

 After a sortie to the nearby supermarket, we sailed through a couple of lifting bridges that didn’t keep us waiting, and onto the North Holland Canal (Noordhollandsch Kanal) – a wide commercial waterway, though we didn’t see many barges. Given the conditions, at first there was hardly any traffic, and in the first hour the only other boat we saw was flying an Australian flag.  It was a question of closing the windows and switching on the wiper:

Trying to get a view of the passing landscape - let alone photograph anything - was not easy:

We made good time, though, and stopped for lunch just short of Alkmaar, which we will be visiting properly later in the week for the Friday cheese market. We thought we might make it up to Kolhorn, but an hour-long delay at a lifting railway bridge scuppered that plan: the computerized navigation system, which takes into account things like bridge opening times, decided we wouldn’t get there until tomorrow morning! There was also a brief delay when the floating suction boom of a dredger drifted across the channel – in fact this was the most exciting thing that happened all day:

A couple of toots on the horn alerted the guys, and one came speeding out in his motor launch to push it out of our way:

Good to the see the canals getting the maintenance they need – but then the Dutch do take everything to do with water seriously.

We decided to stop for the day at the village of Broek op Langedijk, which is apparently famous for its floating vegetable gardens and auction market. We haven’t investigated yet, given the rain, but plan to do so in the morning, for which the forecast is marginally better. At least the municipal port is comfortable, with electricity and water to hand.