Jirnsum and Lemmer

5 August 2015

This morning we took the dinghy into the National Park and the village of Earnwâld. The whole place is heaving with people and boats.   Maybe the warm sunny day helped, but we suspect that this place is always busy in season.   It is well developed and very touristique with all the shops, restaurants and bars doing a good trade.   Not what the Brits would understand by the term "National Park' but in fact non the worse for that, just different.   There is a small Spar supermarket which has its own dinghy mooring pontoon.   There are a lot of 'summer homes' here, some private, some for rent, as well as camping and caravan sites so a dinghy is often used as the shopping trolly.   It all works very well.

View of the area on Google Maps - it's a very watery world.   The location of our mooring on the island is marked with a grey dot, bottom left hand corner:

We returned to Pirramimma for lunch, and at 1415 slipped our mooring for the short (4.5 mile) trip to Jirnsum where we hoped we could collect the correct oil filters for the generator which Boarnstream had obtained for us… which they had!   Clearly it was 'not a problem'.

The correct Kubota filter   :-)  

We bought three of them - and they cost less than the UK supplied units.   Many thanks to Wierd Kramer of Boarnstream for sourcing those for us.

Later that afternoon we went to Grou in the dinghy to buy some galley provisions and also see if we could find a fuel station to buy petrol for the outboard.   Amazingly, we have run this engine for about 12 hours on this trip and used 9 litres of fuel.   There is an excellent Jumbo supermarket in Grou and it even has its own pontoon at the back of the store with 1 hour free mooring.   They really are organised here.

We asked the helpful young lady at the Jumbo checkout if there was a fuel station nearby.   She said "there is only one fuel station in Grou" - my face dropped, thinking it must be somewhere on the outskirts 2 or 3 miles away - "… and it's a couple of hundred metres, just around the corner!"    We like Grou.

8 August 2015

We stayed a second day and night at the Boarnstream yard mainly just enjoying the great summer weather, conversations with the staff at the yard and also our friendly German neighbours in their 8 or 9 metre motorboat called Sirika, which is nearly the same name as a friend of ours from Finland.  Just had to take a picture for them:

The couple on Sirika had originally come all the way from Berlin but now sensibly keep the boat in Friesland and drive the 600-odd kilometres.  They were on their way to the 'southern lakes' of Holland - the delta area around Rotterdam but did mention to us that in the last couple of years the Authorities have opened up the extensive waterways to the west of Berlin around the city of Brandenburg and that they were worth the visit.

View of the Brandenburg waterways from Google Maps.

So late morning on the 8th we headed back to the PMK and south to return to our berth at Lemmer.

/Rich