Thursday 8th & Friday 9th July 2004 Anderten to Junction with the Salzgitter arm.

Thursday 8th July 2004 Anderten. Fixing the moped

11.6° C overcast and dull morning, showers. Mike was up early at 7 a.m. to make a start on fixing the moped. Bill gave him a hand. I got on with the chores. Rain stopped play at 9 a.m. Mike got the bed up and the welder out then reinstalled the Markon (taken apart to do the pump repairs) so he could power the welder. He went to get a new fan belt at 10 a.m. and the rain stopped ten minutes later. Bill came to find out why he wasn’t back at work. Slave driver! They worked on it when he got back, running the welder in the drizzle. Finished at 1.00 p.m. He’d welded a bracket to the nut on the exhaust pipe, and using allthread had secured it along both sides of the cylinder to another bracket at the rear of the cylinder. Then evenly tightening up the bolts on each side pulled the exhaust pipe firmly into the exhaust port. Lunch. After lunch Mike and Bill went out in the car to get some bread and try to find a tackle shop to get Bill a fishing brolly, thinking it would be a good way to make it stop raining. They couldn’t find one after visiting several large DIY stores and garden centres. Bill had been trying to keep dry using a cycling poncho and his sunshade. They came back with some bread and Mike got a few more bottles of Erben Spätlese wine. Once the gear they’d been using outside dried out I put it away and stowed the stuff back under the front seat. Later Mike was looking out of the side doors when a passing cruiser’s wash rolled down the gunwale and came through the side doors on to the steps! He stowed the welder away back under the bed. A cruiser and a yacht moored behind us overnight, overlapping on to the moorings reserved for commercials. Mike worked in the engine room, changing the pulley and installing the new fan belt, plus making an alternator extension adjuster for tensioning the drivebelt.

Friday 9th July 2004 Anderten to Junction with the Salzgitter arm.

13.6° C overnight. Grey, showery and overcast. Set off at 8.00 a.m. We paused at Sehnde

Silo loading chutes at Sehnde. Jul 2005

MBC for water. There was no one around except the crew of a boat which had stayed overnight. Most of the taps around the small basin were turned off. Mike ran out two hoses and then discovered how slowly the water was coming through, so he measured how long it took to fill our little 5 litre bucket, then calculated it would take three quarters of an hour to fill our tank and then the same to do Bill’s. We moved on! A bit further on we came across several people adopting strange poses on the towpath, as if they were skiing - they had ski poles and were dressed for skiing. Weird? I thought someone was taking photos, but Mike said he saw no photographer. Nutters escaped? At 10.15 a.m. one of the cruisers which had moored behind us the previous night overtook us and, as they passed us, the skipper asked Mike if his wash was OK. (More

Coal unloading at Mehrum power station

strange behaviour?) I took some photos of the coal unloading at the power station berth at Mehrum. That little boat called Wels overtook us again and then stopped to empty rubbish, then overtook us again. A large Dutch commercial called Licentia went past, its stern deck was covered in flowers - it even had hanging baskets under a large sunshade awning, lovely. We paused again to search for water, this time at Peine MBC, they had no taps (and no boats there either) and the lone guy who was there said that the landing was only for boats of less than one and a half tonnes - which excludes most cruisers! We carried on again. Our friendly Dutch skipperess off “Spes Mea” was loading rocks at KP 202, she waved - but still scowled - as we passed by. We had a sandwich for lunch on the move as Wels

Girder railway bridge nr Thune KP224 MLK 

overtook us again, its crew waving again, they’d been moored lunchtime at the café at Sophiental. We stopped at 2.20 p.m. and moored near the junction with the Salzgitter branch. The mooring sign had changed - it now said no mooring. We couldn’t see why and ignored it - all the bollards were still there for small boats to tie to. Mike went to collect the car and he called in Peine to find an internet café. We’d had a reply from our insurers on the 9th June to say sorry about the delay but they’d had a computer problem and had asked for a small boat safety scheme cert as a matter of course. They said they would re-read the application and report and would be in touch again. Mike sent an e-mail back to say we were in Germany and gave them our telephone number again. I made chicken curry for dinner. As we were putting the moped back on the roof in a shower of rain, a woman on a bicycle stopped to ask if she was going the right way to Sophiental. I showed her the map, yes, she was going the right way, two more bridges. It rained again later during the evening.