SFI

Crew on board in Nynäshamn

SFI

We take a group of SFI (Swedish For Immigrants) students to the island of Lacka, together with another group of boats.

Winter in port

We arrived in port close to our home on December 6th. This is a nice picture of the Swedish winter.

Saturday, Aug the 8th

Micael starts 6:00 AM and Olga joins for the first lock, so the skipper is left to sleep. Another day of good luck with the locks.

While speeding to keep up with a barge for entering together with into a lock, the motor starts to run a bit uneven. Probably a diesel filter being a bit clogged up, we think. Coming closer to the lock it dies just leaving us with enough speed to jump in land and tie the lines.

When checking there seems to be flow of diesel and no water in it. Still we change the filter and the motor runs again. We then see a small leakage on one of the supply pipes to the second filter (there are two in line) and after checking and re-tightening it is working again. Just to continue.

The kids use the stop-time to have some fun feeding the swans and bathing.

At 20.00 h we come in to the small town of Miltenburg. There is a lot of people and bands are playing rather loud. We are greeted into a small marina (but still bigger than it looked on the map) and they say that we can stay at the entrance. It turn out that tonight is the “Night of Lights” in Miltenburg. The population of 10.000 it quadrupled, two bands are playing on two scenes and they will have the biggest fireworks in Germany. We come into a lot of things by pure chance. The night gets a little later than usual.

Karlstadt

Friday, Aug the 7th

Early start as usual. Magnus goes up at 6 am and sets off. At the first lock he wakes Micael. This day it looks like he has brought us luck with the locks. We go straight in to most of them although we are almost always alone.

"hello, could you help us to find diesel?"

We head for a small little town called Karlstadt. Olga thinks she has heard something special about it, but she can’t remember really what – we want to find it out. We find a little pontoon that looks like the one that the cruising ships moor at. A guy with very determined steps comes down and helps us to moor, and then says that we are most welcome to Karlstadt. There will be no ships coming in and we can safely stay during the night.

The town is very charming with medieval houses and a city wall that was certainly meant to protect the citizens from high water. We find a nice restaurant at the main square. At 20:00 h we here a trumpet played from the city hall, but no one of the restaurant guests reacts, so we conclude that it must be a usual event.

Kids taking a shower while waiting for food to be served.

Later in the evening, when we find out a little about the history of the town, it turns out that the trumpet player is Swedish (or at least was sometime in history). The town was also Swedish between 1631 and 1634. Magnus trys to comment this to some of the waitresses, but no one is interested hearing about it. The town was also severely destroyed by “American” bombing during WW2 and was not fully restored until 1974.

Micael's comeback

August the 6th

We wake up when the propeller stream from the barge in front of us stretches the lines. We are on our way after a few minutes to try to keep up with them to go through the locks with them. We keep good speed, above 7 knots and catch up with them. It turns out that their planning with the locks is not as good as we thought and we have to wait together with them for a few locks until they stop in a port.

this is the place where we go from DMK to Main

We finally leave the canal and enter the river Main. Here we anticipate a favourable stream that will make us go really fast. It turns out that the stream is almost zero. The first lock on Main, number 34, takes 2,5 hours to go through. With that speed through 34 locks and no stream we calculate that Main will take us a long time to pass.
After the second lock, that only take 1,5 hours to pass, we catch up with another ship and things are going a bit better.

waiting and waiting fo the lights to turn green

A little later in the afternoon we pick up Micael that is coming back onboard and we greet him a welcome and celebrate with a specially composed drink (banana dream by the kids J).

august the 5th

We take a taxi in to the city of Nürnberg, and have a little sightseeing. In the afternoon we do some shopping and we get going again by 15:00PM. We keep on going until it gets dark and stop after a lock and moor between two barges.

it gets really tight when we have meeting going the oppsite way

August the 4th

We start from Kielheim up DMK (Donau-Main-Kanal). The canal is good. No stream, our speed increases significantly, we can easily make 7knots if we want. The canal is also relatively straight as the land is fairly flat, it looks very man-made with stoned banks and flowers all along the banks. The limiting factor is all the locks. In the morning it is no problem, we hang on to a barge that we keep the same speed as and just go straight into the locks. We can follow it until the sea water filter gets a bit clogged up from the river and canal debris, and we have to make a short stop to clean it.

the highest point of the voyage

We travel through the landscape and the farmland and it feels like we pass straight through the farms. We wave at the farmers in their tractors while they are harvesting. We are up high and we have a good view over the land. We are over 400m above sea level. Higher than the highest mountain (or hill?) in Estonia. We pass the highest point and then the canal starts going downhill. It starts with 3 locks of each 24,67m. All together we went 156,8m up and down today. Late in the evening we reach Nürnberg.

august the 3rd

An early start, as usual. The river looks have lost another decimetre of water during the night. We start to wonder if we will come any further. However we do and after the first lock the river deepens. The stream is very weak and we make about 5 knots. Looks like we will see the end of Donau today.

August the 2nd

After Passau the river gets really narrow and shallow. It looks like very low water here and the depth is as little as 2,3 m – 2,9 m in the middle of the mainstream. 2,5m depth is usual, all over it feels deep. There are lots of people bathing and water-skiing, but we do no longer meet commercial transport: one cruising ships and just a couple of barges.

We stand on ground for some minutes when we tried to anchor to take a quick bath.

At night we moor at some loading place for barges. It’s less than 100 km left on Donau for us.