Flanked on either end by large windmills,
Dokkum is a decent sized town – it almost has that “small city” feeling to it, but not quite. Some of our cruising friends had parked their boat here – rather cheaply at first glance – and left it for a week while they took the train somewhere else. So we decided to check it out, even though our original plan for leaving the boat parked there and taking the train into AMS for Sail Amsterdam had already been reorganized.
The windmills on either end are cool, and they make for absolutely brilliant night photos when they are lit up and twinkly, but the town itself was not my favorite.
- Showers are WAY out of the way from the most popular tie-up points in either side of the split canal after you enter the town.
- The brug geld (bridge toll) is priced like you were going into London during commute hour.
- There is just not that much to do (at least not that we found on this trip)
Ah, but if you want to go somewhere else…
In our case, we met an Englishman and his wife, and they told us about their many trips to the Frisian Islands. We had zero knowledge of the islands at that point – other than seeing them on a map – and neither of us had read the Riddle in the Sands (Erskine Childress, 1903, more on this later), which is the origin story for the name of our boat.
We were originally going to bail on Thursday and head back to Leeuwarden, since we were parking in Jirnsum while we headed to AMS and then parts TBD (more on that later too). Three to four hours a day of motoring is a very acceptable amount of progress, in my opinion, since you can only see so much before it all starts to run together and while you are only motoring at 5 mph or less, it still starts to wear on you after sitting and waiting at locks and bridges – nothing ever moves at the speed you think it’s going to, so trying to haul ass on a long motor means that you will be tired, you didn’t end up seeing much, and it’s not an incredibly pleasant way to spend a day in the canal.
Anyway, we decided to go to Ameland instead of leaving. Lucky for us, we did check the ferry ticket availability and pre-book our tickets – regular ferry is like 10€ and fast ferry tickets are ~20€. We got a regular passage over since the fast ferry tickets were sold out, and then we had a fast ticket back to Holwert Haven, which is the mainland bus terminal and ferry port. There’s plenty more about this trip in the Ameland post.
We did enjoy the Kota Radja restaurant in Dokkum, they were a bit surprised when we wanted to do a la carte instead of rijst table, and the spring roll was the size of my head – but the nasi was incredible and we will go there again when we’re in town.
Some cool looking galleries in town, the only problem with checking them out this year was our need to find stuff for the boat in a limited time and how to balance that out with things to do that are fun and don’t involve shopping hahahahaah
