RDVIK2016

Is that dock at an industrial area in Erlangen?

I have been following the Viking ships on their Rhine Getaway itinerary. None have sailed through the Rhine Gorge for several days. They all stop short of the Gorge whether they are traveling upstream or down. They swap passengers with a ship on the other end of the Gorge, turn around and head back to the port where they started, allowing the swapped passengers to complete their itinerary.

In this heat ask for a Radler. Beer with lemon soda - sometimes other fruit soda - but usually not overly fruity or sweet. It's more refreshing than regular beer in the heat and is barely half the ABV. No problem drinking three Maß at a beerfest unlike with the regular Festbier. (But still don't drive)

Kind of related to the the plimsoll line, I think. Those marks just show the current static draught of the ship. The plimsoll line marker would show the maximum draught to operate a ship safely - like if you loaded too much gravel on a bulk carrier and did not leave a safe margin of freeboard. This ship has normal draught of 1.5 meters according to Vesselfinder. I doubt if they would ballast it down much more than 50 cm so I guess if the black paint, the top of which is at about 2 meters, is not showing one might suspect something is amiss, like the boat is overloaded or taking on water - that would serve the function of a ersatz plimsoll line. @Notameraid, please add to this or correct me if I am way off. RDVIK

Where will passengers be picked up by their bus? Bacharach, Bingen/Rüdesheim? Mainz/Wiesbaden, Worms, Speyer - even Mannheim/Ludwigshafen would be shorter bus rides from the St. Goarhausen excursion boat. Between them there should be enough docks. How about turning basins, though? Anyway the Speyer or Heidelberg shore excursions on Viking Getaway's day 5 should still be doable even from Strasbourg.

notamermaid, Thank you! You said the magic word: "Abladetiefe". Searching with this term leads to several relevant sites. It is much clearer in German. A better English translation would have been "loaded draught" or something similar. Where have we seen this chart before? Same website - different language. http://www.platformzeroincidents.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Berechnung-nautische-Tiefe-R0.pdf Abladetiefe seems to be a much more useful concept for freight carrying riverships/barges. They would calculate it to determine how big of a load they can carry, especially of a bulk cargo. Cruise ships don't have such variable loads. RDVIK Edited to add an additional important term: The Abladetiefe is the "static load" (in Ruhelage). Then they have to figure the "Absunk" or the measurement of how much the motion of the ship will cause it sink or kind of squat down in the water as it is underway (fahrdynamisches Einsinken). Wow! so much to have to consider it's a wonder more boats don't run aground.

notamermaid, Yes, I have seen that page. I have been trying to figure out why they used the term "Discharging depth" in the text and on the chart, but Navigational depth in the title. "Discharging" anywhere else is a hydrological term of water volume given in cubic meters per second. Maybe just an odd translation into English from a Dutch website of terms from a chart which appears to have originally been in German. I got the formula I used from this page: (You have to click on the plus sign in the box titled So berechnen Kapitäne die wirkliche Wassertiefe" to see the formula) https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/was-ist-ein-pegel-erklaerung-100.html RDVIK

notamermaid, Thank you for finding that info. 1.6 meters must be a ship as delivered by the Werft. Anywhere else they're giving 1.8 to 2.0m. Binnenschifferforum has been starting a thread for each ship as they are introduced and in most cases they list the Tiefgang (draught) as 2,00 m. Sometimes they at "max", on one ship I checked, Tialfi, they did use 1,60. I guess the standard way to report draught is to give the maximum draught which at the same time corresponds to the minimum air draught (Fixpunkt) to clear low overpasses/bridges. Once you get crew, passengers, food load-out, etc., on board you probably can't trim the boat any more shallow than about 1.8 meters. I found a couple of photos of Viking Hlin out of the water where the forward and aft draught marks were clearly visible. The 2 meter mark approximately matches that red bumper line just above the black anti-fouling paint on the lower hull. Any photos of Longships underway don't seem to show more than about 20 centimeters of black paint exposed so they must be cruising at about 1.8 to 1.9 meters of draught. This may not be interesting to anyone else, but as long as I spent the time obsessing about it, I just thought I would share my thoughts. RDVIK

I keep getting wrapped around the axle trying to convert Pegel to depth in the navigation channel. I read that you take the Pegel and subtract that location's GLW and then add the TuGLW which for Kaub in today's example is 62cm - 78 cm + 190 cm = 1.8 meters. Is that correct? A Viking cruise ship has a minimum draft of 1.9 meters, so I don't see the Viking longships making it past Kaub. Is there an additional safety margin beyond the TuGLW that the skippers of the ships dare to use?

"...bussed them to Keil ... " Were they on a river cruise and were bused to Köln (Cologne) or some sort of combined river/sea cruise and were bused to Kiel up near Denmark on the Baltic Sea?

On the Viking Getaway itinerary Viking Egdir and Viking Gymir must not have transited the Rhine Gorge and have transferred their passengers one to another. Gymir left Amsterdam on 18 July and Egdir was scheduled on the Viking website to leave Basel that same day. Egdir does not seem to have a functioning AIS transponder so I have not been able to track her. However Gymir has definitely headed back towards Amsterdam having only made it as far as Koblenz on the upstream run. Gymir was to have arrived in Basel early on 7/25 and Viking website has her starting on the run north from there late that same day - that will obviously not happen. Egdir would have started back to Basel from Amsterdam at the same time, but the the two boats must be switching. All other Viking longships have kept their original itinerary so far and made it through the gorge. As far as Egdir I'll have to use notamermaid's suggestion to check the "in port" listings for Strasbourg and Breisach these next two days and see if I can find her heading back to Basel. This whole exercise is fun for me as I am learning a lot about the river and the relative positions of the towns along it. I had no idea previously that Mannheim and Ludwigshafen are opposite one another on the river and that Mainz and Wiesbaden are also and downstream of the former pair. Next I have to tackle exactly what Pegel is and how it relates or doesn't relate to GIW, NNW, Fehltiefe, etc.

OK, I was tracking the Hlin. Loge23 typed that they are on the Hiln doing a Rhine Getaway so I figured they just transposed teh "i" and the "l". So they are on the Hild on the Paris to Swiss Alps itinerary. Gotta keep our Norse gods and valkyries straight. :-)

Loge23, Well that is odd. MarineTraffic.com and VesselFinder.live both show that Viking Hlin started this cruise in Amsterdam, making it through the Rhein gorge to Speyer and now headed for Strasbourg and Basel. So you started your cruise in Basel on Hlin two days ago? If so the AIS sites are misidentifying the ship, as well the Viking website which said Hlin was sailing from Amsterdam on July 17.

I have been tracking Viking ships going upstream and got a position for Viking Hlin at Leutesdorf, several km downstream from Koblenz. For several hours that did not change on the AIS site, so I thought they maybe had to dock there because of low water in the Rhine Gorge, but finally the boat showed up in Wiesbaden, above the gorge. I guess there was just a poor signal for that stretch of the river and they could still get through.

Reminds me of about 1970 when I was in Germany in the Army, seeing Dutch soldiers in a multinational parade wearing hairnets to tame the long hair they were permitted to grow.

Wow! Like the article says an "astonishing contrast". Such incredible extremes, one year to the next!