Halve Maen

In June 2025, Halve Maen drew attention from a different angle than faults and maintenance. An Efteling employee shared a social media photo from the top of the swinging ship. Looopings described how the image showed the height and impact of the structure when seen not from below as a guest, but from within it as a technician.

The report stressed that the employee was properly secured and that climbing the attraction was part of his work. It gave the classic ship a human behind-the-scenes story: visitors are not the only ones who experience its height; maintenance staff literally have to enter the structure.

For the attraction page, this adds a different kind of value. Halve Maen is twenty metres high, 27 metres long and reaches 54 kilometres per hour. Those figures become more tangible through a view from the top, where the engineering behind the huge swing becomes visible.

On 11 April 2025, Efteling was able to add Halve Maen back to its ride line-up. The swinging ship had been closed for almost a month after a technical fault on 13 March. Work had been visible in the days before, but the park did not reveal exactly what had been wrong.

The reopening was reported concretely: from 17:15, guests could swing again, and the waiting time at that moment was fifteen minutes. At the same time, the maintenance context remained. Efteling already knew that the 43-year-old ship would be out of service again briefly in late June and early July for planned maintenance.

For visitors, the news mainly meant that a familiar Ruigrijk classic was back for the spring period. For fans, it fit the wider pattern: Halve Maen remained preserved and popular enough to draw an immediate queue, but clearly required substantial technical care.

In March 2025, technical uncertainty returned around Halve Maen. On Thursday 13 March, another persistent fault occurred, after which the swinging ship remained closed. Efteling did not know when guests would be able to ride again and gave no details about the nature of the problem.

The article immediately placed the new fault alongside previous years. In 2022 and 2023, Halve Maen had already been closed for long periods several times because of technical issues. By August 2023, the situation had seemed under control, but a year and a half later the ship was out of service again.

For visitors, the uncertainty mattered most: there was no end date, only the message that the ride would remain closed in consultation with the supplier until a solution was found. For fans, the news confirmed that the 1982 Intamin classic remained a technically vulnerable part of Efteling’s line-up, despite its lasting recognizability.