A short crossing, a long memory
The ferry between Den Helder and Texel takes only twenty minutes, but the island always feels at least a season further away than the mainland — and that is, in a way, the whole point of going.
Every regular passenger has their own ritual. Some climb to the upper deck before the gangways close, to watch the long grey roof of Den Helder slip backwards. Others go straight to the same coffee counter on the starboard side, where the same woman has been pouring the same milky cappuccinos for, by her count, eleven years. By the time the foam settles, the harbour wall is already gone, and the dark line of the Wadden flats is widening to fill the window.
If the wind is northwesterly, gulls track the ferry from one shore to the other. If the tide is low, the sandbanks rise up beside the hull like sleeping animals, and you can see seals on them — sometimes two or three, sometimes a colony — turning their dog-faces towards the boat as it passes. In high summer the channel water is the colour of pale tea; in February it goes the colour of slate and the spray feels personal.
"On the Wadden, time is not a clock. It is a tide. Twice a day the sea takes everything back, and twice a day it returns." — Letter to the editor, autumn issue
Texel Tales began as a notebook kept by one of the regular crossers — a marine biologist who used to scribble bird counts on the back of her ferry receipts. Eight years later, the notebook is an irregular journal of letters, sketches and small reports from the island. It is not a guide, and certainly not a brochure. It is, more honestly, a love letter to a stretch of grey-green water that most of the world has never heard of.
What this journal is
- Short essays about the Den Helder–Texel crossing.
- Field notes on Wadden Sea birds, seals and the sandflats.
- Reader letters, sketches and lighthouse memories.
- Slow reading, no push notifications, no advertising.
In this issue
About the crossing
For most of the year there is no other practical way onto the island. The ferry leaves from Den Helder, a small naval town at the very tip of North Holland, and lands at 't Horntje on Texel's south end, where a single road threads into the dunes and a flock of bicycles is usually waiting. The journey is short enough to forget you are at sea, and long enough to remember every other crossing you have ever made.
The boats are big, low-slung, and patient. They have carried sheep, soldiers, fish, tourists, a circus, three brass bands, and — at least once, according to local memory — a wedding party that paid the captain in bottles of Dutch gin. Today they mostly carry commuters: nurses, schoolteachers, students, the daughter of the woman at the coffee counter.
If you have never crossed before, the simplest advice is to go in the off-season, to leave the car on the mainland, and to bring a book that you do not mind closing for the whole twenty minutes. Texel will wait, and the ferry will, too.
— The editors