The Kiel Canal: The Silver Cloud as a Large Riverboat

June 16, 2013

Michael and I spent most of this pleasant Sunday standing on Silver Cloud's upper deck watching the German countryside glide by and snapping photos like crazy.  The Kiel Canal just makes you want to take lots of pictures. The day began with our departure from Hamburg at 8:00 am. I saw the sights on the Elbe River all the way from Hamburg to the mouth of the river 50 miles downstream.

The first few miles or so near Hamburg were industrial.  Major dock complexes, huge cranes, oil refineries and power plants are strung out along the Elbe.  The small airfield with huge hangars and several parked airplanes that apparently is one of the Airbus factories was one of the more interesting sights.  Directly across the river were expensive looking houses overlooked this hardly bucolic view.

Just before our ship reached the mouth of the Elbe, we anchored in the river for a while with the entrance to the Kiel Canal in view awaiting our turn to enter the locks that provide a barrier from the open sea.  The locks are equipped with traffic signals.  A medium sized container ship eventually exited our assigned lock and the lights changed from red to green.  The Silver Cloud slowly moved into the lock, followed by a blue container ship.  Measured in number of ships transiting the canal, the Kiel is the busiest large commercial canal although the tonnage of the ships it can accommodate is less than that of the Suez or Panama Canal.  One hundred ships per day pass through the Kiel. 

At the time of our passage, one of the two western locks where we entered had been closed for maintenance so ships were lined up on both sides waiting their turn.  We observed viewing stands near the lock full of Germans watching the parade. 

Michael and I spent approximately the next seven hours watching the scenery go by.   The first few miles were past power plants, a Bayer Aspirin factory and various construction projects.  Very soon though, we were traveling through rural countryside.  We could hear cows and see people at restaurants and canal crossings watching us. Several hours into the trip, we saw a group of people holding up a sign, jumping up and down and shouting to us.  Michael thought the sign said something like "free Frieda" and wondered what kind of protest it could be.  Shortly thereafter, an excited German man on deck with us asked, "Did you see those people waving?"  He lived near the canal and his friends had made the sign to cheer him on his trip.  He told us he had watched ships on the Kiel Canal for thirty years and always wanted to be in one making the passage from the North Sea to the Baltic.  He and his wife had joined the Silver Cloud for four days from Hamburg to Warnemunde, Germany just to make the canal crossing.  We wished him well. North Germans don't usually get that excited.

At various points along the way there were pump stations, pumping water from land below the level of the canal up into the canal to protect the below sea level land from flooding and incidentally providing the water for the canal.  Shades of Holland.  Much of the farmland in Schleswig-Holstein province near the Kiel Canal is below sea level.  It was a beautiful verdant green with spring crops and pastureland.

The main highlight of the canal crossing for Michael was the appearance of a transporter bridge.  Michael loves transporter bridges.  He thought he knew where all of these remaining turn of the twentieth century curiosities were.  The big ones are in England, Wales, and Spain.  Here, attached to a railway bridge across the Kiel Canal, was a small platform big enough to hold a few cars and pedestrians, suspended on cables from the bridge superstructure.  It made trips across the canal carrying the cars a few feet above the water rather like a suspended ferryboat.

We sat out on deck in daylight until after 10:00 pm watching the Silver Cloud pass through another lock into the Baltic Sea as the sun set ever so slowly in the northwest.  How unique! We spent a day inland on a canal traveling from the North to the Baltic Sea and saving several hundred miles of potentially rough seas around Denmark.