Andreas Fritsch. If you ask Hamburg sailors how often they have travelled through the Kiel Canal NOK with their boats, you often get a shrug of the shoulders. Many have travelled to the Baltic Sea and back so often over the years that they have lost track. Some, on the other hand, have numbers at the ready as if shot from a pistol. And they are quite impressive: "29, 43, over 50 times!
But some of them are also regatta sailors who take part in the Skagen Round, for example: first around Denmark, then back through the canal. The others make one or even several stopovers.
In view of the water sports boom in Germany in recent years, more newcomers than ever will be sailing through the canal for the first time in For them, the more pressing question of how to get in and through safely in the first place naturally comes before the question of possible stopping points en route. And how narrow it really is when encountering the big boats that many people fear. In short, what you should generally look out for when travelling along the canal.
One person who should know is Andreas Jessen from the Northern Waterways and Shipping Authority, who has been working on site for over 20 years and was a lock keeper himself.
We meet him in Holtenau, the eye of the canal's needle. Only the two large lock chambers have been working there since ; the smaller ones need to be replaced. In the meantime, they have even been filled with sand and grass is growing on top. The ground investigations are currently underway and will probably not be completed before The specific completion date is difficult to estimate. Friction woods because they are actually used to keep the big boats away from the lock wall. Their function as floating docks and mooring facilities for yachts is secondary.
