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.

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.