RDVIK2016

One of the more difficult maneuvers for the transportation of U17 has to be getting her off of the barge without a heavy duty crane, such as they have in big shipyards. The rig in Speyer to move U17 from the barge on to land and then to the museum is a 45 meter long 30 axle monster. Keeping the barge level with the ramp involves some pretty tricky use of ballast tanks to accommodate the changes in weight as the transporter is driven on and off the barge. Looking forward to seeing some video of this operation and the movement on the roads to the museum. https://www.rheinpfalz.de/lokal/speyer_artikel,-u-boot-auf-tieflader-wartet-auf-abfahrt-_arid,5508025.html

On Bergfex, webcam views can be advanced or backed up by 15 minute intervals. I found two views from Festung Ehrenbreitstein of U17 passing the Deutsches Eck at 18:15 CEST today. I am sure there will be better images posted soon.

A detailed description of the transport of U17 from Kiel to Sinsheim should to be the subject of its own exhibit! Especially the parts of the trip in around Speyer and Sinsheim. Please share if you run across an article about the barge trip that will take the submarine from Speyer and up the Neckar to Haßmersheim and then from there over the roads to Sinsheim. It will be fascinating to see how they rotate the U17 to get through the bridge(s) at Heidelberg and what kind of barge and push boat they used on the Neckar. Interestingly, in Speyer they are not off loading the sub at the usual industrial harbor, but at the natural harbor on an old channel of the Rhein. There they have had to clear a maneuvering area (to which some have taken great umbrage). The barge, Lastdrager27, is semi-submersible. I wonder if they will be making use of that capability and using spuds to stabilize the barge for the operation.

My wife and I decided to travel this year in April (just got back) thinking no way would we have low water in early/mid spring. However all through February and into March the water levels were looking quite low for that time of year and the low snowpack didn't look like it's thaw would help much. However the rains came and we had smooth sailing the whole way. It looks to me right now that there will very good water levels well into June. Worst case, if a bad drought occurs, is that your Viking ship might have to stop at Koblenz, downstream of the most likely low water spot at Kaub in the Rhine Gorge. Viking would then seamlessly transfer you to the same stateroom on an identical ship at the other end of the Rhine gorge to continue your trip to Basel. They would then give you a tour of the Rhine Gorge area by bus or a smaller local excursion boat if available.

There are already many videos uploaded showing them lifting the U-Boot onto the barge and the beginning of the trip through the Nord-Ostsee Kanal. Here's one short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3F4jvq2B6A

I have not looked at the precipitation maps, but it was raining heavily on Friday as I drove from Nürnberg to Flughafen München. You must have got much of that rain in the watershed of the Rhein also. I will be looking for photos and videos of U17 as she is barged to Speyer. Sections of submarines frequently come into or leave the shipyard in my hometown, although a complete nuclear powered submarine could not be transported that way. It will be quite a sight to see U17 on the Rhein. This is the way one of our shipments is done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WVFSmtezyI

After all my concern and discussion about what would be the water level at Kalb while on our cruise this is what we got today.

Question for Notamermaid and anybody currently on a Rhine cruise: Are you hearing about any labor disputes that might affect the operation of locks between Basel and Iffezheim in the upcoming weeks?

Thank you, notamermaid! That website has so much good information. RDVIK (Bill)

notamermaid, I am not sure if we talked about this before, but it appears to me that the numbers on the Latten are for 10 centimeter intervals. Therefore add a zero to each number to get the Pegel. Is that right? Are all the Pegellatten on the Rhine marked this way?

Well, after the discussion of the Roman Limes, I would have thought I was safe.

Notamermaid, The Boarische Wikipedia and Dahoam in Bayern do play along with the exaggerated stereotypes and friendly rivalries between Bavarians and non-Bavarians (Preissn). That puts me in the non-Bavarian category in way, because some of my ancestry traces back to the Rheinland-Pfalz. The memory of the ancestry was apparently lost by the time of my mother's generation, because she never mentioned it, but today's genealogy resources are incredible. Some of her ancestors emigrated in the 1730's from what are now the districts of Kusel and Südliche Weinstraße. My upcoming Rhine cruise is allowing me to really place those locations in their context. Recently I discovered that one of the families, named Riegel, had departed from Speyer and found a ship in Rotterdam bound for Philadelphia. What was river travel like in 1733?

From the Bavarian perspective the Boarische Wikipedia explains: "es hoasst, daß nerdlich vo dera Grenz koa echte Weißwiascht gem dad und damit aa koane echten Bayern" [aba laute Breissn]. Kathi has a map: https://*****.com/yckt4k5x

Very interesting about the linguistic geography and the several lines linguists have drawn. But one should also definitely become aware of the Weißwurstäquator. RDVIK

The Museum der Bayerischen Geschichte in Regensburg had what I thought was a fun video introduction to Roman settlement there, however there are only a few artifacts of Roman construction around the town, mostly underground. Nothing compared to Trier, etc.

My in-laws were from Oels (today Oleśnica) near Breslau (now Wrocław). They fled the advance of the Russians in the winter of 1945.

Where I learned Umgangsdeutsch one would say (adding a couple of words to your example): "Heid hob I mei neies Auto gwaschn" - Today I washed my new car. "beim kochen" sounds more familiar to me that "am kochen". Anybody have a birthday today? Ois Guade zu deim Geburtsdog! (ois = alles).

Notamermaid, I really appreciate the time that you spend with patient explanations - especially of the water levels - and your many descriptions of interesting sites and towns. All that will enhance the experience of cruising the river. The continuum of dialects as one goes around Germany contains surprisingly vast differences, usually changing gradually, but sometimes changes are drastic. I hear Americans say it must be like going from Massachusetts to Georgia, but they have not idea. My German is a mixture of mostly classroom standard German and picking up some of the Bavarian dialect spoken in the area where Central blends with Northern Bairisch. My former mother-in-law and Oma and Opa where refugees from Silesia. A former brother in law grew up not far away near Nürnberg and speaks a deep Franconian dialect which I could barely make out what he was saying half the time. Unfortunately he is one of those who just does not like to speak standard Deutsch. Then there was my friend from Fehmarn in the Ostsee - just forget about trying to understand him if he said anything in his Plattdeutsch.

I gave an incomplete description of the location of the video I referred to. Within your link was indeed the French language video clip. Also at your link, towards the bottom of the page, was link to another page titled "Insel Rhinau, ein kleiner Dschungel am Rhein". In that one the is found a different video in which, starting at about 35 seconds, there is a man guiding some people in a small wooden boat. He is definitely speaking a German dialect that I had not heard before - I guessed that must be elsässisch. In English I would call the boat a "punt" and the boatman uses a pole to push the boat through the marsh.

There may be a Boppard in France, but we're talking about Boppard on the Rhine just a bit upstream (south) of Koblenz. It in the Rhine Gorge area quite a distance from where the Rhine marks the border.

Yes, I first watched Heimat long ago on US Public Broadcasting and I taped it then. It was in German with English subtitles. Last fall I found it on the German ARD network on line. They made the episodes available for a limited time. I watched them in German and it helped me to turn on the German language closed captioning. I could really identify with the Simons as some lived the old ways in Schabbach, while the world changed so much outside. Even the mundane things of everyday life were familiar to me and brought back memories, like when Paul catches a bad cold and the women boil the Kamillenblüten and have him lean over the pot with a towel over his head and breathe in the hot mist. I learned that treatment when my, at the time, future mother-in-law treated me that way when I was still a US soldier in the Bavarian Forest dating her daughter. (In her kitchen where she had a wood burning cooking/heating stove.)

It has been quite fun to learn the interesting geographical issues of this part of the Rhine. Is that the Alsatian dialect spoken by the guide in the short video found in the article at the link you provided? I agree that it can be called an odd language, but Swiss German is not like school German either. The characters of the series Heimat supposedly speak a dialect of the Hunsrück region. It doesn't seem so bad, but for TV they probably didn't give us a full immersion. There is a scene where I think it is Ernst when he is showing Lucie around his homeland where they are on a hill overlooking the Rhine. He mentioned that they can see Boppard(?) from there. Are you familiar with that? Maybe it was some other town, but it will be fun to pass through that area.

Your comment sent me on a search to learn a little about all the locks as far upstream as Basel. I was not very aware of the geography and did not realize that nine of the ten locks are French - on canals or canalized branches of the river that are on the French side of the border. Only Iffezheim Schleuse is German. It must be a pain in the neck for the Germans when river traffic gets disrupted for by a French labor dispute and for the French if the shoe were on the other foot. (Not to mention the Swiss who would not be able to do anything about it.)

We are about seven weeks out from our cruise so I am beginning to watch the 6-Wochen-Vorhersage für den Pegel Kaub. At least the current prediction does show a probable increase from this week's level, but I would be relieved to see that climatological based bar in the middle move up a bit. Hopefully there is more precipitation over the next few weeks. I guess some snow melt, to the extent there is snow in the Rhein watershed, will probably help provide water in the river by then. Fingers crossed / Daumen drücken.

I am getting a Server Fehler 404 at the url you posted. Was it supposed to link to a story about the Beueler Weiberfastnacht?