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Yerseke (The Netherlands)

Reimerswaal municipality, Zeeland province

by Jarig Bakker, 19 Oct 2004
proposal; design: Ir. A.J. Beenhakker c.1970

Yerseke former municipality
Watersportvereniging Yerseke
Yerseke CoA

See also:

Yerseke former municipality

The status of this flag is uncertain. It was designed by Ir. A.J. Beenhakker, and published by Anton Jansen in "Vlaggen", #71, 1991 - courtesy of Mr. Hans van Heijningen.
Yerseke, in Reimerswaal municipality, Zeeland province, probably never had a flag (just a burgee).
Ir. Beenhakker did design a flag: nine equally high horizontal stripes of white and black, with a white canton charged with a red St. James shell.
The black stripes represent the nine ermine's tails from the municipal arms - however 9 black stripes would have been too busy, so four black and five white stripes have been chosen.
The canton with the shell for the oyster- and mussel cultivation. This shell was chosen because it is more characteristic in form than an oyster or a mussel.
Jarig Bakker, 19 Oct 2004

With 11 scallops in canton, the flag could have suited the Breton Association of Seafood Producers. The bay of St. Brieuc, in northern Brittany, is one of the hospots of scallop fishing, which is extremely regulated, allowed only a few weeks per year to a limited number of ships and watched by helicopters.
A few years ago, the famous strawberry producers of Plougastel-Daoulas, near Brest, issued a car sticker showing the Breton flag with strawberries instead of ermine spots, but I am not aware of any real flag of that ilk.
Ivan Sache, 24 Oct 2004

The city of Yerseke (c. 6,000 inhabitants) is a component of the municipality of Reimerswaal, in the province of Zeeland. It was incorporated into Reimerswaal in 1970. Yerseke is a fishing port located on the southern shore of the Eastern Schelde (Oosterschelde), one of the large arms of the estuary of the river Schelde. Yerseke is the Dutch capital city of mussels and
oysters. The city has one of his ports dedicated to the mosselkotters (mussel cutters), the boats used for mussel fishing. Yerseke has the only mussel auction room in Europe and a museum dedicated to the history of mussel, oyster, shell and sea shell fishing in Zeeland. Yerseke also rears lobsters and musselbeer.

The Eastern Schelde is protected from see flood by the Eastern Schelde Dam (Oosterscheldedam), part of the Delta Plan, inaugurated in 1986. Originally, the Eastern Schelde should have been completely locked, which would have suppressed tides and therefore mussel and oyster rearing in the Eastern Schelde. The dam was modified to allow water tidal circulation:
it is made of 65 40-m high pillars supporting 62 steel floodgates.
The floodgates remain open and can be lowered within one hour in case of storm warning. The tidal amplitude is reduced by only 15 %, which allows traditional fishing and rearing activities to exist in the Eastern Schelde. Th