Long legged blondes

The reason for the title of this blog post will become clear later, but there certainly are a lot of tall people about here. Perhaps it's something in the water - look what's happened to Jo after just a few days!

I'm sure she used to be smaller than me...

Anyway, our trip to Scheveningen where we're currently berthed - some 70 odd miles from Blankenberge - took us about 12 hours. It was a largely uneventful downwind sail apart, that is, from a slight "gulp" moment at the beginning.

As I said in an earlier post, Blankenberge was being dredged during our stay. In fact, they decided to dredge the channel just across the pontoon from our bow during the night before we left - not an especially quiet operation! Anyway, it turns out that they use two mother ships in the harbour entrance so that they can continue dredging without interruption. 0700 on Tuesday morning - the time of our departure - was the time they chose to swap them over!

We called up on VHF for permission to pass between them and were given the OK. That doesn't mean that passing through an ever decreasing gap between two ships is an entirely stress free experience though!

This picture doesn't really show the other ship. It was alongside us.

That was the gap...

This was what 9 of the 12 hours looked like. We had to motor the other 3.

Our first North Sea oil rig

What we hadn't realised was that Den Haag (The Hague to us Brits - why do countries give different names to places elsewhere?) was within walking distance of Scheveningen. There's loads of "culture" there, but a limit to my capacity for such stuff, so we just went to the one gallery which was Escher in het Paleis. This is a permanent exhibition of Escher's work located in the former Winter Palace of Queen Mother Emma of the Netherlands. If you've never heard of him (I hadn't) he's the staircase man - the one who uses tricks and illusions in illustrations to make water flow up hill or stairs continue to climb and yet go around in circles - if you see what I mean. Anyway, I actually found it interesting! Here's some pictures from the palace and a couple of the artist's work:

There were lots of weird chandeliers like this....

.... and this!

One of Jo's favourites. Not sure why.

Look at how the white birds and black birds emerge from each other 

And finally, some pictures from the Hague:

Interesting skyline

It may sound silly, but it seems really foreign here with a language we don't speak and trams!

The parliament building

Scheveningen beach

Oh yes. Nearly forgot! So why the title? Well I can see the statistics of how many visits each post gets and so far "Aliens and Blues" has had by far the most, with "Cosmic" coming second. I can only assume that some people have search engines running to pick up any new posts on their pet topics, so let's see if long legged blondes - and there are a lot around here! - are more popular than aliens!