25th To Hals

After a leisurely breakfast, shower and garbage disposal evolution we were ready to move on. It was still blowing old boots from astern. We let go all of the lines apart from a stern line, started the engines and instruments, slipped the stern line and glid out of the berth with the wind. Out in the river we sailed at the bridge with our November flag on show and noticed nothing in the way of lights, it’s a rail bridge so we phoned up the bridge keeper who was friendly and said, of course we’ll open for you but in about 25 minutes. We pottered up and down and by the time he opened two other boats were also waiting so we all went through and then waited half an hour for the next bridge to open. Once through we unrolled to two reefs the genoa and fairly quickly overtook the other two boats who were motoring but after a bit elected to set some genoas too. We had an uneventful sail down or along the waterway towards Hals, it is quite wide at this point and mostly quite deep so no great need to navigate too carefully. There was a windmill construction site and then a small container port on the starboard side, some farms and villages and holiday conglomerations of mobile homes with some boats moored alongside. It was blowing up to about 30 knots so not as windy as when we arrived at Aalborg but still enough for us to average about 7 knots all the way to Hals at the entrance or, in our case, exit to the Limfjord at the North side. Katharine made some vegetable soup from left over chicken and broccoli bake but forget to actually include the chicken and vegetable bake so it was vegetable soup made in the pressure cooker but, although it was mostly grey with some sun it was very welcome. We had only just finished this whilst arriving at Hals and went in to have a look around. There was a convenient berth with a nice chap waiting to help with our lines with the wind blowing us away from it but we got close enough to give him a breast line from midships and were soon alongside.

Once we’d paid and so on at the machine, they mostly seem to use machines,  we went for a walk around the village, a very quiet retirement / beach resort kind of community by the looks of things. There was a local museum in the old fort and we ‘did’ that and then basked in the sun for a bit before wandering up the main street which had various street vendors displaying rubbish to sell. There were many mobility scooters and zimmer frames in evidence.  A bar had a bicycle with a sidecar with a little dog in it parked outside. We had seen an interesting brick building and it turned out to be a little water tower beside the school. Then we went to the church, a white painted building with only the porch open which seemed to be rigged for coffin management and appeared able to handle multiple funerals simultaneously.

The graveyard was something else, each grave or memorial garden beautifully tended and individually and as a whole it looked wonderful.

We wandered back towards the harbour, stopping to watch a man in his 90’s singing ‘Young Ones’ very well at the bar with the doggy sidecar.

After ice creams at the harbour and some purchases in the supermarket we went back to the boat to sit in the sun in the cockpit and watch life go by.

We played some bridge with Martin and were interrupted by a boat coming alongside us for the night, a First 53 from Sweden.