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).
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