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.

August the 1st

We leave Linz early in the morning, as usual. There are many locks on our way, we do not count how many any longer.

Magnus feels very confident in the locks. In one of them he lets a cruising ship comes in first and he wants to come in front of it to moor at a sliding pollar (just at the lock’s master told us to). But the cruising ship is not ready with their mooring, so just when we are in line with their propeller they press the gas.

The wave coming from the cruising ship throws Ellide Embla to the other side of the lock and into the wall. It sounds terrible, but the only marks left on our boat are small scratches on the paint. The kids wake from the crash and wonder if that was another ground.



Later we try to hitch-hike with a Bulgarian boat, Power-ship going up to Regensburg. They are a little worried if they should encounter any problems with the police for giving us a lift, so we promise them to tell that we have a big problem with the motor should anyone ask. We go ca 1,5 hour with them, then they get a call that they have to come to Passau a bit faster. We go through yet another lock. The Bulgarians are used to tightening barges very hard to keep better speed, but this does not work with Ellide Embla. They are sceptical about our loose lines, so we have to go on ourselves.





We arrive at Passau in the evening. It is a beautiful city and we immediately find a good mooring place, very uncommon. While looking for a place to eat dinner at the kids meet a lady who can speak Swedish. She is a singer and will sing at a local Jazz concert in an hour. The kids are invited to come and listen, so they would not stop talking about that until we go to listen to the lady. Katja is fascinated by the lady and listens attentively. Later on the lady invites Katja to come up to the scene. Katja is not too shy to follow up to the scene and even sings a little, to a cheering German audience and proud parents. A jazz festival was also good hearing something else than the sound of a diesel engine.

July the 31st

The first thing planned this day is the motor repair. Magnus goes round the area in a taxi trying to find a diesel repair. In the end he finds a Massey Fergusson’s dealer who has some pipes in the used parts, but none is exactly the same. He takes a couple that seem to be the same length and bend them in place. This seems to work out, so we shop some food and leave for Linz in the afternoon.

In Linz Olga suggests to moor not in a yacht marina, but in the commercial harbour, she thinks we might find a barge on the way upstream. At least there’s lots of mooring space here, so we stay and take the chance of seeing Linz by night.

July the 30th

We start with going through the lock. This is starting to be a bit of routine although there are still some incidents happening depending on if the locks have sliding pollars, what other ships we go through with, what end the stream from the filling comes from etc…

We aim for a village named Mauthausen that the captain on Mercur 205 said was pretty. When we get closer to the last lock (for the day) Magnus takes a little starboard to make way to two bigger ships. There is a green buoy between us and the land, and we have at least 10 m to the buoy. The second ships for some reason gives us a warning and just a couple of seconds later we understand why as we feel Ellide Embla softly goes aground.

But we do not want to miss the chance to go through the lock together with the ships (there’s always a hope to get to go with them too), so Magnus presses the motor as much as is possible and after some doubtful seconds we feel that the ground does not hold us any longer. But the gear sounds very strange.

We manage to come into the lock in time and stay with one of the boats. They are moving Donau-on-tour exhibition (unfortunately they go too fast for us) and we are filmed by their cameramen. They are interested what a Swedish sailing yacht is doing here and the kids get ice-cream, just in the middle of a lock.

Some kilometres out of the lock Magnus rushes down to the motor to discover the injector pipe broken at the same place. We come into Ennhafen port and try to moor at the bunker-pontoon, but the guys there recommend us to go over to the other side and moor at a barge there, is has no motor left, so most probably will not move J. So we do, and find ourselves in a container terminal.

july the 29th

For once we have no alarm on and sleep until we wake by ourselves. When we wake up we find about 6 cruising ships moored, 3 of them on our pontoon, and a lot of retired people on Donau cruise, strolling around in the town. It does not make them or us disappointed. We leave Dürnstein in the afternoon.



We decide to continue until we find a good place to anchor. But the river is quite narrow and without good anchoring places. As it gets dark and we have difficulties finding an island where we planned to anchor. When we try we do not get any hold with the anchor. It is no sand, only rock on the bottom, and our anchor, the CQR is not particularly good on that type of bottom. We therefore continue a bit further, until about 3AM when we approach a lock. There is a pontoon we can moor at to get some hours of sleep.

and some postcards, of course :)

prison of Richard the Lionheart

july the 28th

Late in the evening we moor in a little village, Dürnstein – on our sketchy map it looked like there should be an old church or castle to explore. The pontoon was very convenient – a sign said that you were allowed to stay there and it was built so that you could do it without being in way for bigger cruising ships.

Ellide Embla, picture is taken next morning, in better light

We had already had dinner, but decided to stroll into the village, stretch the legs. The village was totally asleep, but we found a small wine-bar and decided to have a drink. The place surprised us first by not having beer and second by not having coke J, we get local homemade wine and homemade grapes’ juice. When we asked the owner what “dorf” this was he got very offended and told us that this was in fact a “stadt”. A very old town, and the smallest in Austria,400 inhabitants. It is famous for having imprisoned the English king Richard the Lionheart. On top of the hill they have ruins of a castle from the 12th century. It was destroyed by the Swedes (centuries ago though) the owner of the bar told us. Before leaving the wine bar we decided to have a look at the village and the castle the next day. The owner said it would be more tourists tomorrow as they receive ca 1 million tourists a year here, but all of them are “day-tourists” coming with the cruising ships or bicycles he added.

the speed recors

july the 28th

We check with the Ukrainians in the morning if they have any news on their diesel situation, but they did not. So, we decide to leave Vienna ourselves.
The stream is not that strong, and the nature is beautiful. We probably go through the most beautiful part of Donau. And it looks like people have thought so for a long time – there are lots of old castles, almost one per 10 km.

While we are waiting to go through a lock, a Holland barge takes over us. While in the lock Olga runs over to them to ask in her non-existing German if we can go on their side. They answer that we should talk to them on VHF, channel 5. But they guess what the question was and wave us to come. We moor at their side and they press the gas. That fast have Ellide Embla not gone yet – 8,8 knots over ground, that is ca 10,5 -11 over water. After max 30 minutes when a meeting barge comes by one of the lines breaks and we have to continue the trip by ourselves.

leave Vienna

Astrakhan, the Ukrainian boat had to stay in Vienna overnight to get bunkering next day at noon. So, we got some hours for sightseeing (back by 17:00PM they told us). Scared by so strong stream as it was between Bratislava and Vienna, we did not feel like going ourselves, and Astrakhans crew thought it OK if we go with them to Linz, their destination port.

At 16:00PM however we get a scary call from Astrakhans crew: a water-police have been over to them and ordered us to come over within two hours, there was some problem they said. Well, the only problem we knew about was that we never checked in into EU-Schengen, but it should not be a problem as Ellide Embla has a Swedish flag we thought, being a bit lazy.

We came back to the boat within half an hour and the Ukrainians lent Magnus a bicycle so he would get faster to the police-office which is situated a couple kilometres away. Magnus is back very fast, it took the policemen ca 20 secs to look through the passports and the ship-papers (they more or less lost the interest seeing we actually are EU folks). But the Ukrainians wondered how much Magnus had to pay to get away with it.

Well, the Ukrainians did not get bunkered that day. Instead they got to know that their company had not paid for diesel for quite a while so they will not get bunkered unless the debt is paid. And knowing the economical situation in their country, the crew got very disappointed (well, if we understood it right they are not fully paid for the stop-time, and they did not know how long they will have to stay in Vienna, and moreover, they had so little diesel that even generator motor will have none in two days).

No good news for us, but we decide to stay another night and see if there are any other barges for hitch-hiking in the morning. While kids are playing in a play park ashore, Borja, one of the Ukrainians, comes to Magnus and asks him to buy some vodka for him, a cheap one, since their captain has forbidden the crew to go ashore. As soon as possible, please J, and do not mention this to anyone. It’s ok with us, we will go ashore anyway to find a nice restaurant. But, unexpectedly it’s almost 9:00PM and the local shops look very much closed. Some hour later we find a gas station which is almost closed (they were just closed but opened the door for us).