Haringvreter
Tuesday, 30th June
We had been discussing when we would return home and this morning we finally decided what we would do. After breakfast we would head back into the Veerse Meer and stay overnight on one of the little islands. We would then head for home via Middelburg to refuel, Breskens to overnight and re-provision and Oostend to overnight and break the final leg of our journey to Ipswich. Now all we had to do was plan the passage according to the tides, etc. and hope that the weather stayed settled.
We slipped our lines from Port Zelande marina just after 9 am. We can’t say we were sorry to leave as this one had been a disappointment from the start. Its website led us to expect so much more, but in reality it was lacking the care and little touches that make you want to return there again. We got the sails up and were able to keep them up all the way past Bruinisse to the Grevelingensluice, thanks to a shift in the wind direction. Once through the lock we had a nice warm breeze which took us past Stavenisse and round past Kats through the Zandreeksluis. We were now back in the Veerse Meer and on the lookout for our overnight stop on one of the island pontoons which are provided free of charge to visitors. We sailed on looking at various places and assessing whether there was enough water and/or enough space for us on each pontoon. Eventually we found a good spot and we moored up and got ourselves comfortable. The Island was called Haringvreter.
Chris spotted that two of the boats were British, so disappeared to find out where they came from. On returning he sorted out where he was going to barbeque his sausages and Carole put on her costume ready for a swim. The swim proved to be a short one as there did seem to be a lot of jellyfish around and Carole did not want to chance getting stung, but the water had warmed up to about 20 degrees. It wasn’t a particularly good night’s sleep here as we had a lot of “slap” of wind and water on the stern and despite Chris trying to solve the problem with a couple of fenders, the “slap” remained and deep sleep did not come.