Weekend sailing: Enkhuizen, Mademblik, Stavoren and Urk

Weekend sailing: Enkhuizen, Mademblik, Stavoren and Urk

Nice weather came, so I’ve made a decision to do some weekend sailing. While my friend Bogdan was searching for some other crewmembers, I made a boat renting deal with a Windkracht5 boat renting company. We ended up 5 total people on Bavaria 32.

Route

During the trip I’ve used an iSailor App for route planning and navigating around, specially in the unknown marinas. Her’s the final route one can do:

it’s around 60 miles round trip.

Download GPX for this trip

Enkhuizen

The boat I rented was in a small marina on the side of Enkhuizen, a nice city / village on the Ijsselmeer lake, with the easy access by train (a 1 hour train ride from Amsterdam). I’ve took the boat at 19, did some single-handed parking practice and started waiting for a crew. The crew was a bit late so after short briefing we decided to go to bed early and leave early in the morning.

We left Enkhuizen at 7 am, did some sailing with different angles to the wind, getting used to the boat and headed towards Mademblik. I also found that 2 crew members were a bit sea sick, so I hoped we’ll find some sea-sickness pills on Mademblik.

Mademblik

A nice old city with a beautiful castle. One can observe it while entering the old harbor. Sadly, it was closed inside (. We stopped here for a lunch and managed buying the so-needed pills. After some walking thru the city, the harbormaster gave a tip on Stavoren where to go next.

Stavoren

It was a fast ride here without changing the course; it took us 2 hours of sailing from Mademblik. As we arrived in old harbor, it was starting getting dark. We did a small walk thru the city but almost all the places were closed.

Next day we headed towards Enkhuizen to drop one crewmember there, did some small fix on a boat and headed towards Urk.

Urk

A surprisingly beautiful village! Long time ago, when Ijsselmeer was a sea, this village was an island.

We had a nice walk around enjoying the view on the old houses, and after dinner, headed towards Enkhuizen enjoying the beautiful sunset and sailing thru the night.

I hope the crew had a nice time and enjoyed the sailing as much as I did and I hope sailing with them again.