Friday 25th April 2014 Schmöckwitz to basin on Seddinsee. 2.29kms no locks

Distance markers on bridge at Schmockwitz

9.6°C Sunny with a chilly breeze. Mike re-welded the boss on the swan’s neck as he said I’d broken it by leaning heavily on the tiller when sitting up on the cabin roof. Later, he revised this and said my weight on it was probably the last straw and it needed re-welding anyway (it only had four spot welds that he did years ago, when he finished it this time it had a full ring of weld). I did the usual chores and fetched some bags of summer clothes out from under the bed while the mattress was

Yacht coming at us on collision course and almost hit our bows.

 lifted. Mike put his welding gear away and we set off at 10.50 am watching carefully for commercial traffic coming through the road bridge. Under the bridge and turned right on to the Seddinsee. I took photos of the former Chinese restaurant which used to be really busy and surrounded by moored boats, now empty and gone. A sailboat had just set off from the moorings beyond the restaurant and gone north into the Seddinsee through the gap in the Weidenwall (two islands with trees). Two speedboats travelling at a great rate of knots were coming down the lake towards us and a school of

View north of Seddinsee

dinghy-sailors were milling around with two instructor boats herding them together like little lambs. The sailing yacht (which had set off up the lake same time as us) with a varnished wooden hull (an old one) was tacking across the lake from our left and on a collision course with us. Mike kept a straight course down the middle as he didn’t want to tangle with the kids in dinghies coming up on our right, but the yacht kept coming and turned, tacking just a few feet from our bows, shouting something we

A friendly yacht, passing behind us.

wouldn’t like to translate as he went back to the left. By complete contrast, a yacht travelling with the wind straight down the lake went past smiling and shouting hello! The other yacht, (travelling up the lake) came back again but went behind us this time, still shouting obscenities, but by this time we were passing the schoolkids and started heading left for our mooring. Glad to see the back of him! Mike steered into the basin carefully keeping an eye on the depth via the echo sounder. It was OK so he backed out and winded to reverse alongside the quay on the northern edge of the basin –

Rescued - it was in the water before its wings dried out

there was also another concrete wall on the far side but overgrown with trees. He stopped when the prop started churning up mud, came forward a bit and we tied to exposed bits of rebar that made good mooring points. It was 11.20 am. We’d moved less than a mile and half but were now back in the forest with no houses within several kilometres. However, within minutes there was a pack of walkers passing within two hundred metres as there is a well-used forest road! I fished a newly hatched dragonfly (a yellow and black gomphid) out of the water, took a photo of it and set it on a tree branch to finish drying itself out. Five

Moored in the old basin on the Seddinsee,
just north of the Oder-Spree-Kanal

minutes later it had gone. Finished tying up and putting all the gear away. Mike took photos and I made some lunch. He said there were a lot of trees close by that had been chewed by beaver. We hadn’t been here five minutes when a hired (55€ plus petrol, it said on the side of it) speedboat with man and two children arrived, moored behind us for five minutes then left – toilet break for kids? After lunch I did the log. Mike put the Internet on, oh dear, - GPS. He put the antenna on the roof and got a 3G signal. He’d had a reply from a chandler in Ireland who had checked the channels for him on a similar Yaesu Marine VHF radio to ours and said it had all the channels that we were missing. Mid-afternoon three small boats came and moored behind us – popular quiet spot!