A 1986 steel Wattenkreuzer finding her way from the North Sea to the Mediterranean — one lock, one harbour, one story at a time.
Meet the crew & the boat
We are the little crew behind BERTA — a family of sailors who fell for a sturdy 1986 steel yacht in Bremen and decided to bring her home to warmer water. Instead of the open Atlantic, we chose the quiet way south: the rivers and canals of Europe, dropping the mast under bridges and locking down through five countries toward Turkey.
This site is our logbook, our route planner, and a small toolbox of things we built along the way. Everything here is free to use — if it helps you plan your own trip, that already makes us happy.
From drying out on the tidal flats to the warm teak below decks.
A mix of photos aboard BERTA and refit concept renders.
Why a sailing yacht can cross Europe by canal — and what she flies once she’s out.
European Waterway Planner
Our full planner, live on the page. BERTA’s Bremen→Mediterranean route loads by default — or hit “Plan my own route”, click a start and destination anywhere on the Western-European network, add stops, and it finds the shortest waterway path for you. Switch to the side profile to see every lock and tunnel along the way, with details on hover.
Covers France, Belgium, the Netherlands and western Germany (up the Rhine) — the whole Bremen→Med corridor. Shortest path is computed live from 12,400 real waterway segments. Tunnels come from the waterway data; lock counts are modeled estimates. Eastern waterways (Danube, Elbe) are a planned extension.
Free BERTA App
A dead-simple logbook for your own boat trips — record passages, locks, weather and miles, watch your engine live, then turn a day on the water into a shareable log entry. Built for BERTA, free for every sailor.
Learn photography — free
The best part of a slow voyage is having time to see. Over at vilijam.art, Vilijam shares a complete photography course — composition, light, editing — free to read, in several languages. Perfect for capturing your own waterway.
No paywall, no login. Just open it and start shooting better.
Open vilijam.art →Marinassist
Marinassist is a full marina toolkit: lay out berths, boats, pontoons and facilities on a 0.5 m grid, trace over satellite imagery, and drive a live IoT layer for power, water and reservation lamps. Download the basic version for free — upgrade to PRO when you're ready for more.
Marinassist and the BERTA App are free because people chip in. If they saved you time, a small donation keeps them free for everyone.
WindAgent
WindAgent keeps an eye on wind, rain radar and the forecast so you don't have to. It watches live radar and tells you when your next weather window opens — before you cast off.