Amsterdam is a lovely city, we like it a lot. After a quick look on the city center on Tuesday evening we stayed in the Sixhaven harbour until late Wednesday afternoon. The sun was shining and it was too hot to go into the city center. But that was alright, then we had time to relax on the foredeck. During Wednesday another Swedish yacht arrived, S/Y Candela, it's a 40 ft Jeaneau with 8 persons about our age. They are going to sail to New Zeeland in 19 months, their schedule are much tighter than ours and they will probably move on a lot quicker. Maybe we'll see them again in La Coruña if we speed up. Wednesday evening we met up with the crew of S/Y Candela and took the ferry to the city centre. It was hard finding a table for ten, but we did and enjoyed our second dinner out. Still no LPG on Cantare so we can choose between going out or eating cold food. The rest of the evening we cruised around different bars, trying local beers. Don't worry mothers we didn't go to any coffeshops. But the smell of cannabis was everywhere and on our way back towards the ferry we ended up in the Red Light District. It was strange seeing all tourist watch the prostitutes in their windows. We didn't stay long.

Yesterday we borrowed some charts from S/Y Candela and took them to a local printing store where they copied them for us. Now we have charts to the Canaries, and hopefully someone in the ARC will lend us theirs for the Caribbean. That way we save a lot of money, since we use our digital charts all the time they are for back up only.

After a quick lunch aboard we decided to finally explore the city during day light. Erik, a friend from Sweden, was in Amsterdam for two days and joined us. We walked through the Red Light District ones again towards the Anne Frank house and an area called Jordaan. The queue to Anne Frank house was long and we decided to go back later. We strolled around Jordaan and it was much less crowded with tourists. The houses are very nice, tall and narrow with big windows looking out over the canals. On the canals small boats stride up and down between the houseboats and barges. We stopped for ice-cream and enjoyed sitting down for a while, then continued on. When returning to the Anne Frank house the queue was just as long, we'll save that visit for another time. Instead we tried a local specialty, miniature pancakes. They were very sweet and quite nice.

In the evening we had dinner in the cockpit, afterwards we went over to Candela where they held a pool party on foredeck. As the night crept on the neighbours started to hush, we went home to sleep around 2 am to the neighbours delight. Today the radio called us earlier than they usually do, we were still asleep. Maybe some of you missed us, then you can hear it here.

Today we will leave Amesterdam and continue southwards. The bridges in the city center opens up between 2 am and 4 am, probably because they want to disturb the traffic as little as possible. Therefore we will not leave the harbour until tonight. I have uploaded some new pictures from Amsterdam, you find them here. / The Captain