Bruges
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Today is the day we move into Bruges, and we set off eagerly for our mooring in the Flandria yacht haven – this trip had the potential for us to encounter some larger traffic, and immediatley on switching on the AIS we could see the signatures of the larger ships ahead of us, mostly manoeuvring in and out of the access to Zeebrugge. We waited until things had calmed down then asked for the bridge to be opened and set off round the outskirts of Bruges. At the last lifting bridge, having been lulled into a false sense of security and having stopped looking for AIS targets, we positioned ourselves and hovered directly in front of the bridge. It lifted, but no green light. Then we spotted the rather large commercial heading towards us! Quickly moving over we realised it was in fact two very large barges, the first 77m x 8m and the second 80m x 8m. These won’t be the biggest we will see but it was a lesson for me regarding positioning and the suction they can bring to bear. They passed us ever so slowly, and whilst we were as far away as we could be, we moved back and forth, side to side for what appeared an eternity.
On arriving in Flandria we were greeted by Patrick and directed to our mooring. As quickly as we could, we moored up to explore the town which is only a 10 minute walk into the centre – Brugge is just a brilliant town, there is so much to see and every turn uncovers more photo opportunities. The whole place is interesting and relaxing and below is just a very small sample of the photos we took.
One of our trips was to the diamond museum which included a demonstration of diamond cutting. Thoroughly enjoyable although I was a bit worried that Nicki had expectations of coming away with a gift because of my propensity for impulse buying. (Nicki’s comment – Well, he does like his surprises doesn’t he … he disappeared for a few minutes to go to the loo, and I did wonder if he was going via the jewellery shop, but sadly not – it was just a loo break!)
