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.