About

From the bridge to the gallery

I grew up in Harlingen, on the Frisian coast of the Netherlands, in a house where you could hear the ferry horn from the kitchen. My grandfather was a pilot on the Wadden Sea and my mother worked in the harbour office, so I don't remember a time before I knew what a buoy was. At eighteen I went to the maritime academy on Terschelling, and in 2000 I joined the ferry company as a junior officer on the Harlingen–Terschelling crossing.

For seventeen years I navigated that route, and the shorter one to Vlieland, in every weather the North Sea could think of: summer days with a thousand cyclists on the car deck, January nights when the fairway buoys were coated in ice and the radar was full of sea clutter. On those nights, the lighthouses were not scenery. They were the most trustworthy colleagues I had. Brandaris on Terschelling, the white tower on Vlieland, the lights on the Harlingen breakwater: I knew their rhythms the way you know the footsteps of people in your family.

In 2017 I came ashore for good. It was the right decision and I still miss it most days. A few months later, on a whim, I took a train to Zeeland to see a lighthouse I had only ever read about, and it occurred to me that I had spent half my life looking at lighthouses from the outside and almost none from the inside. So I started visiting them, and writing it down, and the notebook turned into this website.

How I count

The number on the home page (118, at the moment) counts lighthouses I have climbed, stood at the foot of, or passed within a couple of cables by boat. Rock towers I have only seen through binoculars from shore, like Ar-Men, are marked “seen” in the atlas and don't count. Lightships count if I have been aboard. Harbour lights on poles do not count, however charming, otherwise I would be at about nine hundred.

I travel mostly by train, ferry and bicycle, and fly only when the sea gets too wide, which for New Zealand it unfortunately did. I pay for everything myself. Nobody sponsors this site and no links on it earn me anything.

About the site

Lighthouse Notes is written by hand in plain HTML and CSS, with a few lines of JavaScript for the atlas filter, the light demo and the packing list. Every illustration is a small piece of SVG, drawn by me with more patience than skill. There are no photographs on the site, partly to keep it light and fast for readers on slow connections, and partly because a drawing lets me show what I remember rather than what the camera saw.

I add a journal entry after each trip and revise the atlas several times a year. When readers send corrections (and they do: retired keepers, sailors, radio amateurs, one very exacting man in Aberdeen), I fix them and say thank you.

Privacy

The short version: no cookies, no tracking, no ads.

• This site does not set cookies and does not use analytics, tracking pixels, social media buttons or embedded content from anyone else.
• Every font, drawing and script is part of the site itself. Your browser does not contact any third party when you read these pages.
• The packing list on the Visiting page remembers your ticks using your browser's local storage. That information stays on your device, is never sent anywhere, and disappears when you press “Clear all ticks” or clear your browser data.
• If you email me, I will use your address only to reply. I don't keep a mailing list, and I never pass anything on.