Emma's journey home from Bremen-Lesum
Küstenkanal > Ems > Hannover 2011
During the winter storage 2010/11 at the Wadephuls’ on the Lesum, I completely repainted Emma and thoroughly overhauled the 2-cylinder compound steam engine I built in Hannover. Virtually factory-new, Emma was relaunched in spring 2011. Several summer trips on the Lesum familiarized me with the tidal currents on a relatively small river. Every trip had to be planned according to the tide calendar to avoid struggling at full steam against currents exceeding 10 km/h at narrow points like bridges in slow motion – naturally, this happened to me on my first outing...
On June 8, 2011, Emma, a friend, and I embarked on the journey back to Hannover. Naturally, it was raining again, and we traveled with the „windows“ down. Coming from the Lesum, we turned downstream into the Weser at Vegesack. With a width of nearly 300 meters, it is classified here as a seaway and navigated by correspondingly large ships.
Passing the Lemwerder-Vegesack ferry, the Abeking & Rasmussen shipyard, and the Lürssen shipyard, our schedule was planned to leave the Weser with the receding ebb tide after 17.3 km at Elsfleth.
The 24 river kilometers of the Hunte from Elsfleth to Oldenburg resulted in a tidal difference of over two hours that day. While low tide occurred in Elsfleth at 13:52, it was not reached in Oldenburg until 16:02. An energy-conscious steam boater would have moored in Elsfleth and waited for the incoming tide at the Hunte estuary. With plenty of coal on board, however, we immediately pushed forward against the river and tidal currents.
Triumphantly, we reached the Oldenburg lock at 17:00. Unlike the friendly Weser lock experiences on the outbound journey, everything here ran strictly according to schedule. After over two hours of waiting, we were the only participants in the last recreational boat lockage of the day. The mirror-smooth coastal canal was now ours alone. The next mooring reachable before sunset was identified in the Elisabethfehn Canal, where we tied up at 22:20 under a magnificent sunset glow.
Fortified by coffee, fried eggs, and bacon prepared onboard, we continued on the Coastal Canal. Historically, it is undoubtedly a significant structure, but otherwise, it’s just a 64 km canal journey with one lock in Dörpen, which releases you into the Dortmund-Ems Canal (DEK).
Since the Weser current towards Hannover seemed too strong for a return trip, I had chosen the Dortmund-Ems Canal (DEK) as the return route. The DEK follows the Ems on many sections but bypasses several river meanders through locks. These weirs reduce the current in the waterway so much that it is sometimes barely noticeable, while the winding river sections offer a varied landscape. On the second travel day, we moored in front of the Hüntel lock after covering 75 kilometers.
The third day of the journey was set to take us to our destination, Nordhorn, where the local heritage association had invited Emma and me to their water festival. Punctually at 3:00 PM, we met the motor vessel Graf Ship—named after the association and originally acquired in 1929 as the steamship Söse by the Minden Water and Shipping Authority for towing and pushing services—in the Old Harbor of Lingen.
This escort for the final 16 km to Nordhorn by the motor vessel Graf Ship had a specific reason. The official NLWKN website (Lower Saxony State Agency for Water Management, Coastal and Nature Conservation) states about the Ems-Vechte Canal: “No traffic safety provided by the owners and operators of the waters and facilities (Caution: underwater obstacles, especially in the Nordhorn city area, possible!). No guarantee of specific water depths or clearance profiles.” The Graf Ship had cleared the almost untraveled canal section of two bicycles and other “weeds” on its way to Lingen, acting as a minesweeper to ensure Emma could pass unscathed. We were rewarded with a romantic canal journey, though I couldn’t imagine two vessels, each up to the permitted maximum width of 6.5 m, passing each other—assuming the navigable waterway was even consistently 6.5 m wide.
After two weeks of solitary mooring at a private dock, Emma took three distinguished council members aboard on the festival day to sail past the cheering Nordhorn crowd on the canal. Unfortunately, the weather took the name “Water Festival” too literally. The crowd was nowhere to be seen, and the elected representatives preferred not to transfer to the provided rowboats at the designated spot, opting instead to take advantage of Emma’s warm and dry accommodations to return to their cars.
After bunkering 250 kg of lignite briquettes and ample provisions, Emma, my tinkering friend Wilhelm, and I set off the following week on the return journey to Hannover. In a special shift organized for 4:00 PM, the hand-operated swing bridge at the town entrance cleared the waterway into the Ems-Vechte Canal.
We covered a total of 23 km and one lock before mooring at 8:00 PM in front of the Hesselte lock, which was already out of service for the day. A hearty dinner with an after-work beer and the cozy onboard accommodations once again proved Emma’s comfort for multi-day trips with overnight stays.
On the 30 km stretch of the Dortmund-Ems Canal (DEK) from the mouth of the Ems-Vechte Canal to the Nass Dreieck, six locks must be navigated. The 4- to 8-km sections between these obstacles were enough for the inland vessels locking with us to overtake us, leaving us waiting in front of closed lock gates. Thus, one practices patient fire-keeping until the next lock passage.
Around 12:00 PM, the final lock in the chain released us into the Nass Dreieck, from where we turned into the 163 km lock-free home stretch to Hannover. This was a completely different kind of journey. At a steady cruising speed, briquettes were added according to the clock, and the engine was lubricated. Only an overnight stop at kilometer 70.5 in Preußisch Oldendorf interrupted this routine until Emma reached her mooring at the Marinekameradschaft in Hannover.
While the outbound journey from Hannover to Peter in Bremen-Lesum covered 219 river kilometers and took four days, the return trip required two stages of three days each, totaling 333 river kilometers and 14 time-consuming locks. All participants thoroughly enjoyed the experience.