6/12/2016 - Kinderdijk

6/12/2016 - Sunday

0730 h- We have arrived and Kinderdijk and will be heading out shortly for our tour of the windmills.
Our guide did an excellent job of explaining about the historical perspective of water control in the netherlands.  The idea was that Polders or bathtube like areas (hundreds of acres) would be created by building dikes and then the water would be pumped out of the polders so that the land could be used for cultivation and habitation.  This is where the windmills originally come in.  They used windpower to move the water out of the polders and keep them dry.  Each windmill was operated by a millner and his family.  They would run the windmill where there was wind and when there was water that needed to be moved.  They were paid by the hour when the windmill was working.  The dutch windmill was really the start of a very successful and very important industry that lead to the milling of everything from wheat to the sawing of wood (the sawing of wood using wind power was very important in giving the dutch a leg-up on the construction of their huge fleet of transport ships).
The tour was about 1.5 hours long and it was very interesting and informative.  Definately worth doing.

Below are a series of pictures covering the time from breakfast to lunch and the beginning of our journey to Cologne.

A view of the Viking Skadi docked at Kinderdijk.  The ship is 135 meters long and 11.5 meters wide.

Breakfast this morning.  Lots of choices- all of them very good.

More Breakfast items.

The bread and toast making area.

The world heritage site.  Kinderdijk mean children's dike.

There are 19 windmills at this site.  The ones on the right side are made of brick and those on the left side are made of wood.  This was because the right and left sides belonged to different water "water boards" each of which had there own ideas about what was the best construction material.

A brick windmill.

You can see the main parts of the windmill in this photo.  The sails were attached with a hub/shaft to the gear on the cap and the tail of the windmill was both a counter balance to the heavy blades and a way of controlling the direction the sails were facing.

Our guide explains how the tail was used to rotate the cap of the windmill so that the sails were facing the wind.

This building, built in 1640, was the home of one of the water boards in the area.  Our guide said that the water boards were very powerful and definately took care of themselves.

Here we are standing by one of the drainage canals that used to be fed by the windmills.  Now the canals are emptied by huge diesel screw pumps.. see below.

These three large screws lift water out of the canal and put into the river on the other side of the dike.  They can pump as much as 90.000 liters of water a minute.  There are two such stations on this canal and between the two of them can move 180,000 liters of water a minute.

Rod and Sandy by the same canal.

Here you can get an idea of how large the sails are.  When the wind blows, a canvas sail will be unfurled on the wooden slats.  The amount that is covered by the sail depends on the wind speed- the higher the wind speed the less sail they unfurl.  At their highest speed, the tips of the huge sails can be moving 90 miles per hour.  Since they come within a couple of feet of the ground, it is very dangerous to be near them when working.

Wooden gears on the inside at the base of the windmill.

Early in the tour, very attentive and interested.

Towards the end of the tour, not so interested or just tired?

Back at the ship we had a safety drill where we got our life jackets on and assembled at our assigned stations and then we headed out to lunch.  

I had a nice salad with sunflower seeds and pickled beets.

Lunch on the Aquavit deck.

After leaving the Kinderdijk area we traveled over to the Rhine river and the blue track shows our travels over the first 3 hours after leaving.  The river seems quite high and is flowing swiftly against us.  Amsterdam is in the upper left center of the image.