We sailed out of Amsterdam Saturday evening. It was a beautiful, warm evening, and everyone was out enjoying it.
Note all the people on the observation deck of the tower.
Ferries going back and forth, small boats, and cruise ships (i.e., us).
Pretty boat harbor, off the main harbor.
Notice how the highway suddenly disappears and goes under the harbor.
Our pilot boat.
On Sunday, we sailed through the Wadden Sea and headed for the mouth of the Elbe River, which would take us to our date with the Kiel Canal. We were scheduled to head to the entrance lock to the canal around 1:00pm. We attended a morning lecture about the importance of the canal and were all primed to be there.
Whoa! Not so fast.
About noon, the captain came onto the loudspeaker to tell us there had been an accident in one of the two larger locks. That meant the two-way canal had just become a one-way canal. Even though the Viking Sea had been sailing full-steam to get there, there were four ships ahead of us in the queue. We were going to have to drop anchor and not enter the lock until 10:00pm. Most of us thought we must have misheard him. But, alas, no.
Since it takes an optimistic 11 to 12 hours to transit the canal, we obviously weren’t going to be in Warnemunde (port for Berlin) for everyone’s planned excursions early in the morning. In fact, we wouldn’t be arriving in Warnemunde until 5:00pm. Hmmm….
So the decision was made that we would stay overnight Monday in Warnemunde and do all the planned excursions to Berlin and elsewhere on Tuesday morning—as planned, but 24 hours later.
The only problem with that was we just lost Copenhagen from our itinerary!
There has been some grumbling, as you might imagine. In fact, according to our captain’s update this morning, there have been a number of comments on social media, some people asserting that this was an accident from back in February (hence Viking should have known about it). He assured us that while there was an accident in February, the one causing our problems occurred in the early hours of Sunday. And the Viking Sea had been scurrying ever since learning of it to try to be as close as possible to the front of the queue to ameliorate our problem.
We dropped anchor in the Elbe River, and this was our view for the next 8 hours.
About 6:00pm, the captain announced that one of the ships in the queue ahead of us had some technical problems and ceded their position in the queue to us.
The queue.
We entered the lock about 8:00pm.
At the lock in Brunsbuttel, the entrance lock going our direction.
Our nighttime passage through the Kiel Canal.
Monday morning, the captain called our Kiel journey a miracle passage, which we made in only 9 hours. We were accompanied by the most spectacular lightning storm I have ever seen. It went on nonstop for about 2 hours.
We emerged from the Kiel end of the canal early this morning and are sailing on calm seas in the Baltic now, heading for Warnemunde.
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