Day 30, Dee Dink Dee Dink

..... we dive at dawn!

Lyn has always had a strange fascination with submarines, hence the title of this blog post. Das Boot is an often quoted film in our house! He was up early to get to the Naval museum as it opened at 10am.

The museum is split into 4 areas, pre WW1, WW1, WW2 and after WW2. It is quite a small museum; the main exhibits are the boats outside that you can clamber all over. There was no mention of Hitler, Naziism the Third Reich etc; all the information was factual about the ships only.

At the start of WW2 there were only 57 U boats available to the German Reich, but only half were suitable for deployment in the Atlantic. The U boats were deployed in packs against allied convoys of merchant shipping. The USA had enormous shipbuilding capacity when it entered the war in 1941, which meant the new building figures remained higher than the tonnage of ships the U boats managed to sink. In addition, the allies had superior reconnaissance possibilities using radar and sonar technology. They also cracked the German Navy’s telegraph code. When more than 40 U boats were lost in May 1943 alone, the Germans suspended the Battle of the Atlantic, and the development of new types of U boats came too late to improve the situation. By the end of the war 757 of the 1157 U boats had been sunk, and around 29000 U boat crew members and lost their lives.

Lyn went through the U boat twice whilst it was quiet. It was not a WW2 U boat but he still had the impression of the claustrophobic working conditions.To be underwater in hot sweaty conditions, hunting and being hunted, the submariners must have had nerves of absolute steel.

Whilst Lyn was squeezing into tiny gaps not meant for his size, I was out walking on the dike. It was just my type of walk; flat, empty and right by the sea. It was amazingly peaceful. I did about 3 miles, and then went back to the van to recline in my chair outside and finish my book on my kindle. A perfect couple of hours for me! It was also the only time we have spent apart in a month!

Lyn came back and we packed up, ready to move on to our next country! We bought our last cheap food and beer of the holiday.

We were trying to get to places where we wouldn’t normally get to; so we had opted to visit the very Northern part of the Netherlands. We had to cross the amazing dike at IJseelmeer. This is a closed off inland bay, and is Holland’s biggest lake. It’s special because it used to be the Zuiderzee (South Sea). We crossed over the 32km embankment that closes off the lake; at low tide the water in the Wadden Sea drops below the water in the lake, and the water is run off through sluices.

After we had crossed this we found a camping spot at our next point of call, Holland’s main Naval base, Den Helder. We drove in, and orientated ourselves, looking at some of the big boats moored up, then went out for a walk and a drink.