PART 4
In the final leg of their Netherlands tour the Saunders head for home via the pretty town of Edam, the buzzing city of Amsterdam and the unassuming village of Uithoorn
Stavoren was our base for another very enjoyable “working week” spent aboard Juneau. It was getting hot and the days were filled with splashing sounds as our Dutch neighbours leapt off their boats to cool down in the water of the marina.
After taking the dinghy to a waterside supermarket to re-provision, we left Stavoren and ventured across the Ijsselmeer to Enkhuizen. Whilst the Ijsselmeer is an inland sea, it is very shallow and can get a bit choppy when the wind gets up. With Juneau’s cruising speed of about six knots the crossing would take about two hours.
We timed our departure carefully to make sure that trip would be as comfortable as possible for all of us, not least Tex who, despite having four feet, does not have any sea legs! The crossing was smooth with a few interesting sights along the way, such as a small trawler surrounded by gulls.
We spent a night in Enkhuizen before heading south on the lake. Like the UK, the weather in the Netherlands is changeable and it didn’t look so promising for our trip down the Ijsselmeer, through a lock in the Markerwaarddijk, into the adjacent inland sea known as the Markermeer.
Our destination was Marken, formerly an island in the Zuiderzee but now connected to the mainland. The island has a tumultuous history punctuated by several major flooding events. Since the building of the Afsluitdijk these events are thankfully over, but their legacy is evident in the tiny but densely packed hamlets, or Werfs, which residents constructed on the limited areas of marginally higher land on the island. And yet the flood lines show that even these safe-havens suffered major floods. Nowadays Marken is more of a tourist destination where activity is centred on a scenic harbour surrounded by restaurants, shops and holiday accommodation and the stop off point for the Volendam to Marken ferry.
Our trip to Marken was less smooth than the crossing to Enkhuizen, with waves hitting our stern quarter most of the way. With no autopilot, it was manual steering and course corrections all the way as we ploughed on. The journey was hard and we were glad to arrive and take our spot in the harbour.
However, Marken is worth the effort and we have visited several times on our trips to the Netherlands. Once settled it was time to put on our walking shoes and to take Tex on a circuit of the island, which is a perfect distance. This gave us a chance to stretch our legs and to discover some of the lovely wildlife on Marken, particularly the hares that live in the central fields
