11th & 12th June 2005 Weekend off - below lock 9, Nakło Zachód

11th June 2005  Below lock 9, Nakło Zachód.

Moonlight at sunset

Day off. Milder 8.5º C overnight. Grey, cloudy and windy. Mike said the cruiser that had anchored in the middle overnight had gone past very quietly at 7 a.m. - lock opening time. I didn’t hear a thing. Mike had his breakfast then went down the engine room to investigate the problem with the air accumulator tank. Inside it was a large black rubber bag, which had split along one edge and was starting to perish on the inside. Needs a new one, so he ‘phoned a UK chandler. The chap he spoke to said at first that it was cheaper to buy a new unit as they were only twenty quid. Then, when Mike explained that we were in Poland, he told him he had some units in the workshop which had failed, they had pinholes in the welds, each one had a new bag inside. He said he would extract one and drop it round to Glyn’s for us (which was extremely

Moored on the quay below Naklo Zachod

nice of him). He only charged us a tenner for it. Meanwhile Mike put a cycle inner-tube patch on the bag and reassembled the accumulator. He refitted it back into the water system - bet it won’t hold until the replacement arrives! Salad in a bowl for lunch. Mike went for a siesta. Bill knocked. He asked if he could have copies of our photos from Bydgoszcz onwards as we had forgotten to do him a disc, he’d brought us four UK waterways magazines, one which contained his letter about the statue of three men in Berlin where he mentions he’s cruising with us and gets in a plug for his website billybubbles.

Sunday 12th June 2005  Below lock 9, Nakło Zachód.

Day off. 5.5º C overnight. Cold and windy with fast flying clouds, sunny spells. Mike

Paddle gear on the Notec

tried ringing Glyn to tell him about the man calling round to deliver a black rubber bag for us, but he was on the ‘net (anyone remember dial up??). Bill brought his laptop round to show us a programme called Irfan that he uses for organising photos. The details he gets for each photo come from the summary section on properties, which is a function available on XP, but not on our ancient Win98. Glyn called back ten minutes after Mike had rung and left a message. He told us that he now has a new hobby - he has started doing watercolours. Mike took some test photos using the tripod and various settings on the camera. Then he put the generator on and ran the PC. To check that the cloned copies of the Kodak programme ran OK, he

Flags fluttering.

uninstalled it off our hard drive and used the clone to reinstall it. The copies of the photos we’d got saved on CD had no captions!! Waah! All that work for nothing! Bill came round to have a look at what Mike was doing on the PC and loaned us a book, Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi”. Mike tried various methods to keep captions with the photos, nothing worked, it didn’t even save the “tags” which mark chosen photos as favourites or the locks it can put on to prevent accidental deleting. Stir-fry for dinner. Mike started watching the Canadian Grand Prix on TF1 (French TV) at 6.30 p.m. but they took the racing off to show scenes of the homecoming of a female French journalist who had just been released by terrorists in Iraq. He gave up and turned it off.