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.

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.