Day One Hundred Forty-Seven and Forty-Eight - June 2-June 3

The next two days will be combined into one blog. June 2, we arrived in Kiel Germany entering the channel around 06:30 before arriving at 08:00.

Kiel (population 249,000) can be found in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and is 90 kilometers north of Hamburg.

As we sail towards our dock the German Naval Shipyards are across from our stateroom. One ship is presently being constructed here and several German naval ships were also in port.

A blue line painted onto to the sidewalk from the cruise terminal allows easy access to the city centre.

We are staying until 22:30 before supposedly departing for the transit of the Kiel Canal. I learned however that it was not until around 03:00am that we left Kiel for the canal. We passed through the first lock at 04:30 before entering the canal.

For trivia buffs, name the busiest canal in the world? If you answered either the Suez or Panama Canals, then you are incorrect. The correct answer is the Kiel Canal.

Every year approximately 63,000 boats transit the canal while the Panama transit numbers are between 13,000 -14,000 and the Suez Canal transit number is 19,000.

I am awake early thinking I would see us enter the lock and making our way into the canal. However when I arise at 06:30 we had already been in the canal for two hours and it was rather foggy.

At certain sections of the canal, you can see what looks like traffic lights advising the captain or the pilot when it is good to proceed. Several times our ship came to a stop to allow bigger ships coming our way to past as the channel became narrower.

At its widest, the canal is just over one hundred meters. At several points car ferries take passengers from one side to the other. This would be a very tedious job. Back and forth.

A bridge ferry is also used where several cars drive on and transit over to the other side by means of a pulley system, hanging over the water.

At the end of the transit from the Baltic Sea to the North Sea I noticed construction is underway for another lock. At roughly 14:30 we leave the canal and sail into the North Sea.

We are now on our way to Rotterdam Netherlands.