Petite canals enliven cities like Amsterdam,St Petersburg,Bruges and Venice but there's nothing quite like a big canal. These giant shipping channels sculpt the landscape,connecting oceans,separating continents and joining rivers.
Strategic canals like the Panama connecting Pacific and Atlantic,the Suez separating Africa from Asia,or the Corinth,dividing the Peloponnese from the Greek mainland appeal to the child in us. They recall tranquil beach days when,with bucket and spade,we engineered the geography of the sand,carving cities,channels and moats to temporarily corral the seawater.
For this canal lover,known to rise in the small hours to experience the hulking locks of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal,which straddles the European watershed,Germany's Kiel Canal,adds another"big canal"experience to the list.
The Kiel is the world's busiest man-made waterway for seagoing ships,used by a similar number of ships as on the Panama and Suez canals combined.
Our Baltic Sea circumnavigation aboard APT's Hebridean Sky ends with a 4.30am arrival at Holtenau,on the Gulf of Kiel,in the virtually tideless south-western Baltic Sea. The 17-kilometre-long Kiel Fjord (not actually a fjord) funnels ships to the giant Holtenau locks at the easternmost entry to the Kiel Canal,delivering them to Brunsbuttel on the North Sea at the mouth of the River Elbe.
The canal slices through Schleswig-Holstein,Germany's northernmost state whose Baltic coast capital is Kiel,90 kilometres north of Hamburg. This feat of engineering reduces the stormy 460-kilometre sail around the Jutland Peninsula - negotiating"the Sound"(Oresund Strait) and"the Belts"(the Danish straits) - to a 98-kilometre,eight-hour glide.
A ship from Dover to Kiel saves 682 kilometres and about 18 hours compared with the voyage via Skagen on Denmark's northern tip. And while the confluence of the North and Baltic seas at Skagen is a superb shape-shifting place of luminous light,the shipyard graveyards of those fallen victim to violent waters pointed to why seafarers have long sought to avoid the Jutland journey.
The Kiel Canal took more than 9000 workers eight years to build in 1887. Today,its banks harbour plump grazing cows,anglers trying their luck in the rain (more than 75 fish species inhabit the canal),cyclists,dog-walkers,canal-spotters,free car-ferry stations for 14 ferries,and wooded hillsides intersected by the occasional clutch of farmhouses,bridges and electricity transmission towers.