Giliell’s Notes: The Wadden is a national treasure and national park and an area with imense biodiversity, despite its occasionally bleak looks. It’s fascinating, it’s interesting, but also very dangerous. The difference between low and high tide can be several metres of water in hight and some kilometres in area. The dangerous parts are the tidal creeks. They are like rivers in the Wadden, up to several metres deep in some places, but deceptively shallow in others. At low tide, it’s no problem to cross them and walk up the the water’s edge. When the tide is turning, the edge doesn’t move much, so you might not even notice that it has changed. During the first two hours the water just fills the tidals creeks. Then they run over and the tide climbs in earnest, up to 2cm per minute. If you’re still behind the tidal creeks, you’re now trapped, as the water is now coming from both sides and the current in the creeks is strong and dangerous. That is the moment you call 110 and get to know a lot of people who will now think badly of you. If you want to experience the Wadden, go on a guided tour. If you don’t wnat to spend money, wait until the guided tours set out and stay behind them.

Socks:

They told me we were going on an adventure, but then they put me in the car. Why do all adventures have to start with the car? Anyway, we went to a different place and walked to the big water, only that the big water was gone, but instead there were people and they all went for a walk with me. That’s nice, I like going on walks. I also like the sand and the mud. You can dig in there or do wormies. I love doing wormies, but mum insists on giving me a shower afterwards. Spoilsport.

 

Things were fine for a while until we came to a creek and the nice lady who was walking with us said: “Hmpf, I thoight the water would be lower by now. There’s no help for it, we need to walk through.” And by walking, she meant swimming. Not for the twoleggers, but for poor small doggies. I can swim. I just don’t like it a lot.

On we went and I must say, there were a lot of interesting things, but mum, cruel as she is, didn’t let me have them. No live crabs, no crab shells, no crab shells with half rotten crab parts in them. That was mean! I also wasn’t allowed to chase all them birdies.

At some point the twoleggers got very excited, claiming to have spotted some sea dogs (German for seals). Hearing that, I was very excited, too. Would they be nice? Did they want to play? I can tell you, it was very disappointing. The so called sea dogs turned out to be blobs on the far away shore. Not okay.

Another thing I don’t understand ist the twoleggers obsession with walking to things. The things are never intersting stuff like a nice lady’s pee puddle or a delicious dead animal or something. No, in this case it was a big metal thingy surrounded by water. You know, I wouldn’t have minede it the thing had been on the sand and not in the water, because at that point I really needed to pee, but there was nowhere to pee against.

Giliell’s notes: What you can see is the lower range light of a pair of guiding lights. While a lighthouse is typically telling ships where not to go, these tell ypu where to go: You line up the lower range light and the upper range light and keep them straight. Right next to it is the channel towards Bremerhaven, which is deep enough for some of the world’s biggest ships to pass through.

Anther fun thing was the water. Thankfully I didn’t need to swim again on the way back, but the ground was always wet. That’s OK, but can somebody please tell me how I got wet all over? I can’t remember having agreed to any of that!

Finally we returned to the land and boy was I glad! I ran towards the first tufts of grass and peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed. 3.5 hours with no peeing is no fun, I can tell you. So if you ever go to the Wadden, remember to bring your own tree, because they’re really lacking in the tree department there. I wonder how those sea dogs are doing it.