'2 Meters with Rocks'

Or

2 Dire Days on the Danube and the Drava

A change of flags was called for, the Croatian and Serbian ones for the Hungarian

With a glass of Tokaji Szamarodni, a delicious sweet white wine of Hungary, we drank a toast of fond farewell to the country which had been so kind to us and which we had come to love, thinking this would be our last night in Magyarorszag (Hungary), but it was not to be. We were tied on to a floating but closed-down restaurant and bar in Mohacs, with the permission of Dominica, the friendly young owner who went about accompanied by Mocha, her cute light brown fluffy dog with a chocolate drop for a nose. The pontoon stood in the full stream of the swollen Danube, which was 5 or 6 meters higher than normal and running with a speed of maybe 10 kph.

Throughout that night, Sulina shuddered as hefty logs borne along by the swift water smashed into her hull. Our ropes held well; the crashing sound woke me though again and again, and my imagination went wild with riotous images of what 'might' be happening below the waterline. At the end of the unrestful night around sunrise, I was awakened once more, this time by Johannes' voice, 'Liz, we're sinking!' He had stepped out of bed and into ankle-deep water.

We speedily took off the floor panels and began bailing with all the buckets we could find and we could barely keep up with the amount of water flooding in. Where was it all coming from? At 6am we phoned Dominica and asked her to find help.

Very quickly, her partner Anton, who owns a hardware shop, was there with a couple of other guys and a big electric garden pump. With the 40 cm of water in the bilge pumped out, we were able to spot the source of the flooding, 2 unidentified metal pipes with threaded ends had water gushing out of them. They seemed to be totally irrelevant to the motor function, so we plugged them and watched as the water stopped.

Then followed hours of mopping up as we pondered aloud what could have gone wrong down under. Our best guess was that the two pipes had been part of an old cooling system fed by water in the keel. We had noticed already when Sulina was on land in Straßburg that the keel was hollow, almost like an extra water tank. There was a sort of plug on the keel that we'd tried to take off in order to investigate, but it was solidly stuck, so we had never solved that mystery. Perhaps a log had dislodged the plug, allowing the keel to fill up with Danube water till it reached the two pipes? We won't know the answer till she comes out of the water for the winter, in whichever harbour we decide to leave her at the end of this year's trip.

So then we had one more night in Hungary after all and the next morning we chugged shortly upstream to clear customs. In view of what had happened in Mohacs, we took the option of leaving the swollen Danube after going 67 km and then driving about 20 km up the Drava where we expected to find much less high water and to have a couple of restful days and nights to explore something of Croatia in the town of Osijek and to recover from that stressful episode. It was a fine natural waterway, much narrower than the Danube with ducks and high-jumping fishes, and very peaceful.

Our first stop on the Drava was to clear customs for Croatia at the government customs house somewhat before Osijek. We could hardly believe our eyes when, below a moonscape of sandhills with the fluttering EU and Croatian flags, we spotted the rusted out, decrepit remains of a 'once upon a time' mooring place.

We surveyed it with dismay, seeking a piece of metal which would not slice through Sulina's lines. Eventually we managed to tie on, heave ourselves onto a semi-sound piece of the structure and cross the sandhills and overgrown railway tracks till we came to a building with the appropriate flags. Inside was a friendly and polite gentleman who facilitated our entry into Croatia with humour and apologies for the failing infrastructure.

Then on into Osijek, feeling the fatigue of a long day's drive, almost there and spotting an attractive old harbour basin (sadly to the left of a tiny but R E D buoy) ... maybe it would save us a few minutes to go there, it was after all getting really late ...

There was a terrible CRUNCH!

And our dear Sulina was suddenly stuck on rocks.

Really seriously badly stuck.

Johannes tried to go backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards, then left, right with the bowthruster but to no avail. Liz tried to feel around in the water with her feet and with the boathook. It was around 2 meters deep, clearly plenty of water for us, but the propeller was stuck probably between rocks and we weren't winnning.

But then a little tiny boat with two Croatian guys appeared and they said, 'We'll try to help you.' They took our ropes and strained away, trying to get Sulina free. Eventually another small boat came along and they helped as well. And then there were three! Three small boats and five young Croatian men, shouting, laughing, pulling on ropes and knocking into each other's outboard motors and boats. Maybe it took 1 1/2 hours of crazy chaos, it felt like that long, but with a whoop of victory, 'We did it!!!', shouted the leader, and we all drank a glass of Hungarian schnapps to celebrate.

We said 'It was strange to get stuck here, the depth sounder showed 2 meters of water.'

'Yes, that' right,' he said. 'It is 2 meters. 2 meters with rocks!'

A great ending to our first day in Croatia, but we knew that Sulina's beautiful bronze propeller was damaged and that we would, sooner rather than later, have to pay the price of that dire mistake.