Our main reason to stop at Makkum was to visit the Tichelaar's Royal Ceramics and Tile Manufactory. It was founded in 1594 and has been under the same family management since 1641! The tiles and ceramics have a luminescent quality from a special white glaze. They are the only remaining tin glazing factory in the Netherlands (tin glazing was invented by the Arabs in the middle east and brought to Spain in the 11th century.

The tour was very interesting (maybe we missed a little since it was in Dutch) and the two of us another couple followed the process through the factory, from the pile of clay in the yard to the final quality control.

Every piece is hand painted and no two are the same. The factory tour made our visit to Makkum very worthwhile. We bought a few tiles with painting of Dutch boats on them.

After a couple of days in Makkum we sailed out of the peaceful harbor and planned to head south to the town of Urk. Unfortunately the wind came directly from the south. No problem, the Isselmeer is large so we planned a number of long tacks that would get us to Urk. A short time after we left the marina and while still motoring we hit bottom. It was just a couple of bumps and being close to shore it did not bother us too much (OK, it did bother us a little.) But then we were in open water, had the sails up in a force 4 wind and we were making nice speed. A couple of miles away from shore, where the depth on the chart gave us 10 inches of room below our keel (When sailing in the Netherlands you get very used to being happy when you have 10 or more inches of water below the keel). But then our depth gauge read 2.0 meters (our keel depth), but we were heeled so thought we had a little buffer. As it read 1.9 .. bump...1.8... bump...bump... We hit a number of times while I tried to decide which way to turn. I had no good idea, but wanted to make sure we kept the wind in our sails and Tenaya heeled over as much as possible. With Katie pointing one way I turned the other way. Luck was with us and it worked. But my heart was thumping and I kept watching the depth gauge for the rest of the trip.

After tacking back and forth, trying to go south we finally gave up with 15 miles to go and talked ourselves out of continuing on to Urk. We headed west to Enkhuizen. We'd covered 42 miles by the time we arrived. The next day we sailed back to Amsterdam and began the inland canal route (the Staande Mastroute) that allows a sailing ship with her mast up to go from Amsterdam to the southern part of the Netherlands. Our first stop on this route was Haarlam.