Saturday 23rd April 2005 Santok KP68 (Warta) to KP 202 (Notec). 23.8kms no locks

Santok on the confluence of Warta and Notec

A chilly 0.2º C overnight. Sunny with chilly breezes. Bill knocked on the cabin at 7.10 a.m. as he was getting very anxious about Rosy sitting on the bottom with the water level dropping. He’d moved some ballast to starboard to counteract it, but was still not happy and wanted to forget shopping and set off. Mike assured him it would be OK. The water level had only dropped 1.5” in twelve hours. (On flooded rivers Mike always takes measurements or puts a marker stick in the bank

Beaver chewed trees

edge) The shop (a sklep called Mini Max) didn’t open until 9.00 a.m. as it was Saturday, during the week it was open at 7.00 a.m. Mike and Bill went to get a few perishables. Meanwhile I got on with the usual chores. Mike came back with bread, eggs, tomatoes, lettuce and mushrooms – and the news that the Post Office doesn’t open on Saturdays. Just before he returned the ‘phone had beeped, there was an SMS from Hans, our maps of Poland had arrived and he wanted to know what to do with them.

White-tailed eagle - Wiki photo by Yathin sk

Mike sent him a text back to say to hang on to them for a couple of days and we would sort out an address to send them to. We helped Bill move Rosy to moor on the other side of us, in deeper water, while he rearranged his ballast and finished getting ready to move off. We set off at 10.00 a.m. The underside of the road bridge at Santok across the river Notec was filled with sand martin nests end to end, unoccupied as yet. The Notec was narrower than the Warta, but still flowing just as fast around 3.5 – 4 kph. The first white-tailed eagle we’d seen on our new Polish adventure flew across the scrubland covered flood plain to our left, a

Bill at the helm with Fanny in her favourite place.

magnificent sight! I went in the cabin to do a bit of cleaning and, just as I’d finished, Mike called me to look as there were two deer by the water’s edge just in front. As I looked out they took fright and ran, scaring a crane into flight too – the first crane we’d seen this trip. Mike had been looking for things that looked like grazing sheep (we hadn’t seen any domesticated animals, no sheep and only two cows the day before) which is what my bird book says distant feeding cranes look like. There were lots of dead trees standing

Greenshank - Wikimedia photo by Ken Billington

in the Notec flood plain and lots of evidence of beavers - chewed and felled trees. As we passed the pumping station near Lipki Mały a big rusty brown bird flew across, a female harrier – but was it a Marsh, Hen or Montagu? Too far away to tell! We had lunch sitting on the stern watching an episode of a TV wildlife documentary unfolding all around us! A long water meadow along the right hand bank was still partly flooded and was a haven for all sorts of birds. A pair of cranes flew overhead, then shortly afterwards we saw another pair feeding in the meadow alongside us, far enough away for them to ignore us and close enough for me to have a very good view through binoculars. Then a group of five white storks were feeding in the damp meadow; big red beaks dipping into the grass, at each step a backwards flip and whatever was in the beak went down the throat! A pair of fishermen were on the bank fishing from the

Whimbrel in flight - Wikimedia photo by Tupungato

meadow, the storks and swans ignored them in their own quest for anything edible in the damp patches of the meadow. In a big clump of reeds, the head of a stork appeared every thirty seconds before delving back into the depths in search of frogs, snails or fish. Just before the road bridge of the 157, a large group of nervous greenshanks were feeding and taking flight every few minutes, amongst them was a lone lapwing and a solitary whimbrel, whose mournful cry was unmistakable. Upstream of the road bridge there was a small house with a yard reaching down to the water’s edge. Chickens were scratching in the yard. A sign at the water’s edge announced “Straznik Wodny” – it sent me off in search of the dictionary as we knew “Wodny” meant water.

Well, a slight resemblance to a kangaroo??
Wikimedia photo of red deer by Da Voli

“Straznik” means guardian, so “Straznik Wodny” must be the lengthman’s house. In the yard, leaning on the fence was another bunch of kilometre posts. Another post thief! Just upstream was KP 207. A little further on two large deer bounded away from the river bank into the reedbed, one turned and stood to look back at the boat and we saw a face that almost convinced us it was a kangaroo! It must have been a red deer, although there are colonies of wild wallabies in Britain, we don’t really think there would be wild kangaroos surviving the winter in chilly Poland. The bright shining yellow flowers of marsh marigolds appeared next to a pumphouse shortly before we stopped to find a mooring for the rest of the weekend by KP202 in the middle of nowhere. I threw a bow line around a tree felled by beaver (and with recent teeth marks showing where they’d stripped the bark from lots of trees) and Mike got the plank off to put a couple of mooring pins in the bank to hold the stern, then called Bill alongside. Fanny was glad to get off again to investigate the dried out reed bed we’d moored next to. It was 4.10 p.m. and we were all glad to find another quiet place to moor. We’d passed a couple fishing about a kilometre back downriver before we tied up and seen a couple of  vehicles on the flood dykes, but other than that, the birds outnumbered people by several hundred to one. Mike lit the central heating as the temperature took a nose dive mid-evening.