Tuesday 13th August 2013 KP28.5 R.Havel Day off – Snail arrives.

Sunny start with clouds, heavy showers after lunch. Ran the engine to power the Markon to do some washing as it was piling up. Did two loads and Mike hung a line between the pine trees up top of the bank and hung out the duvet covers and sheets. He said to come up the top of the bank to have a look. There was a rough wooden hunting platform a couple of metres high. From the top you could see lots of holes that looked like old bomb craters with large trees growing in them. Went to have a closer look and found what might have been gun emplacements and trenches. The ground was covered in thick mosses and heather. Didn’t bother hanging the second lot of washing outside as it started to pour with rain. Traffic busy, all shapes and sizes of boats heading to the lakes and back, some were making a huge wash and ripping our mooring pins through the soft soil. Mike put thicker, longer pins in to see if that helped, it slowed it down a bit. The Snails arrived at 4.30 pm in a rainstorm, tagged alongside and we all went inside to dry out. When the rain stopped Oll took Woody up the bank for a walk and came back with two big pieces of bent and twisted metal that looked like shell casing, shrapnel! Traffic still busy up and down the river, so Oll went up and down the bank in Origami and knocked another two pegs in the bank to tie their bows and stern. We sat on the front deck of Snail and talked about their fine by the WSP on the Elbe. They were planning on going directly to Rotterdam where a friend had arranged a winter mooring for them.