The Elbe river 2023 - not just water levels

[notamermaid]

The situation on the Elbe is still not good but the wave has gone through Dresden. This is Dresden:

 

The upper reaches of the Vltava are still relatively high, I see level 2 (orange) at Cesky Krumlov. Flood warnings are also issued for the Havel and other rivers feeding the Elbe downstream from Dresden.

 

notamermaid

 

[OwenSmith]

My mum wants to do Elegant Elbe on Viking. We're flexible on dates and are more interested in choosing a time of year least likely to be disrupted due to water levels (low or high). Based on reading this thread, April or the first half of May look like the best best. Any comments? I know nothing can be guaranteed, I'm just looking to improve our odds.

[AnhaltER1960]

10 hours ago, OwenSmith said:

My mum wants to do Elegant Elbe on Viking. We're flexible on dates and are more interested in choosing a time of year least likely to be disrupted due to water levels (low or high). Based on reading this thread, April or the first half of May look like the best best. Any comments? I know nothing can be guaranteed, I'm just looking to improve our odds.

Indeed, April/May and November (and, in fact December, despite this years Christmas flood) are the safest bets for an uninterrupted journey. April/May, of course with the longer days and the fresh spring colours out there, are the more attractive months. 

[OwenSmith]

1 hour ago, AnhaltER1960 said:

Indeed, April/May and November (and, in fact December, despite this years Christmas flood) are the safest bets for an uninterrupted journey. April/May, of course with the longer days and the fresh spring colours out there, are the more attractive months. 

It's not going to be November/December for us.

 

It's also a shame about the restricted set of cruise lines on the Elbe. We'd like to sail into Prague but CroisiEurope's fixed menu for dining ("Chef's Choice" they call it) just isn't an option, there's too many things both of us don't like to eat. Most of the other Elbe cruise lines are too down market for us to consider, so our choice ends up being Viking almost by default.

Edited December 31, 2023 by OwenSmith

[Host Jazzbeau]

8 hours ago, OwenSmith said:

It's not going to be November/December for us.

 

It's also a shame about the restricted set of cruise lines on the Elbe. We'd like to sail into Prague but CroisiEurope's fixed menu for dining ("Chef's Choice" they call it) just isn't an option, there's too many things both of us don't like to eat. Most of the other Elbe cruise lines are too down market for us to consider, so our choice ends up being Viking almost by default.

Did you look at Noble Caledonia?

https://www.noble-caledonia.co.uk/tour/3220/from-berlin-to-prague/?search_url_id=1

 

[OwenSmith]

5 hours ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

Did you look at Noble Caledonia?

https://www.noble-caledonia.co.uk/tour/3220/from-berlin-to-prague/?search_url_id=1

 

Having cruised with Noble Caledonia once in 2008 I don't ever want to again. It was an epic 3 week cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow then back to the Volga all the way down to Astrakhan. What we saw was amazing, but it is the only holiday I have ever lost weight on. Even some locals that joined the cruise for 3 days on honeymoon didn't like the food. We bought breakfast cereal, dried fruit and biscuits at a supermarket half way through to supplement meals, but it wasn't enough.

 

Also Noble Caledonia charter Elbe Princess II from Croisi Europe, and having looked on Croisi at the ship the cabins are tiny and the ship looks pretty basic.

Edited January 1 by OwenSmith

[Host Jazzbeau]

25 minutes ago, OwenSmith said:

Having cruised with Noble Caledonia once in 2008 I don't ever want to again. It was an epic 3 week cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow then back to the Volga all the way down to Astrakhan. What we saw was amazing, but it is the only holiday I have ever lost weight on. Even some locals that joined the cruise for 3 days on honeymoon didn't like the food. We bought breakfast cereal, dried fruit and biscuits at a supermarket half way through to supplement meals, but it wasn't enough.

 

Also Noble Caledonia charter Elbe Princess II from Croisi Europe, and having looked on Croisi at the ship the cabins are tiny and the ship looks pretty basic.

Understood.  My only experience with Noble is on their owned ship Hebridean Sky, which didn't suffer from any of those deficiencies.  But we were spared a voyage on Serenissima, which might have turned out closer to your description.

 

OTOH, I believe Croisi has a better record for actually sailing on the Elbe than Viking, which often ends up with a boatel at each end and bus trips for the sites.

[OwenSmith]

12 minutes ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

Understood.  My only experience with Noble is on their owned ship Hebridean Sky, which didn't suffer from any of those deficiencies.  But we were spared a voyage on Serenissima, which might have turned out closer to your description.

You haven't heard the half of it, there were so many things wrong on our Noble Caledonia cruise. We have more anecdotes from that than all our other cruises put together. It's funny now but by week 3 we were wondering whether we'd survive.

[AnhaltER1960]

8 hours ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

OTOH, I believe Croisi has a better record for actually sailing on the Elbe than Viking, which often ends up with a boatel at each end and bus trips for the sites.

I am sorry, but I cannot confirm this. The Viking ships on the Elbe (Astrild and Beyla) do have roughly the same draft as Croisi's Elbe Princesse I and II have. So theyre stuck at the same times in case of low water. This year in October the Elbe Princesse was moored in some canal near Magdeburg, unable (or unwilling) to sail the Elbe - there are shallow bits near Magdeburg- at the same time when Viking had resumed sailing already.

 

Croisi have the more attractive plan, sailing all the way from Berlin into Prague, over Viking who actually sail only between Wittenberg and Decin and do the Berlin and Prague ends by bus. However, the Viking plan is more stable in low water conditions and involves less bussing to reach the destinations in between. For example Wittenberg, the Viking boatel is already there, Croisi have a 4 hrs bus ride (return) from their mooring place to Wittenberg, just to do the same route again the next day to reach the other upriver destinations.

[notamermaid]

Happy New Year to you!

 

6 hours ago, AnhaltER1960 said:

The Viking ships on the Elbe (Astrild and Beyla) do have roughly the same draft as Croisi's Elbe Princesse I and II have.

You said in a different year that the length of the ship makes a difference on the Elbe, too, meaning manoeuvring the bends. I suppose between Croisi's and Viking's ships there is not much in it. Meyer Werft gives the Astrild and the Beyla with 110m length and 11.45m width. CroisiEurope says the Elbe Princesse II is 102m long and 11 metres wide.

 

The MS Swiss Ruby certainly has a size advantage over both, she is only 85m long and 10m wide. Wonder what her draft is. She sails into Prague as Rebel54 has confirmed.

https://www.viva-*****/en/ships/ms-swiss-ruby

 

notamermaid

 

 

 

[Rebel54]

10 minutes ago, notamermaid said:

Happy New Year to you!

 

You said in a different year that the length of the ship makes a difference on the Elbe, too, meaning manoeuvring the bends. I suppose between Croisi's and Viking's ships there is not much in it. Meyer Werft gives the Astrild and the Beyla with 110m length and 11.45m width. CroisiEurope says the Elbe Princesse II is 102m long and 11 metres wide.

 

The MS Swiss Ruby certainly has a size advantage over both, she is only 85m long and 10m wide. Wonder what her draft is. She sails into Prague as Rebel54 has confirmed.

https://www.viva-*****/en/ships/ms-swiss-ruby

 

notamermaid

 

 

 

Doing some googling to try to find out more on the actual ship and found this.  More info on the cruise but can't find anything on the draft of her.  She's a beautiful boat.

https://www.teemingrivercruises.com/ships/ms-swiss-ruby/

[OwenSmith]

18 minutes ago, notamermaid said:

You said in a different year that the length of the ship makes a difference on the Elbe, too, meaning manoeuvring the bends. I suppose between Croisi's and Viking's ships there is not much in it. Meyer Werft gives the Astrild and the Beyla with 110m length and 11.45m width. CroisiEurope says the Elbe Princesse II is 102m long and 11 metres wide.

Length makes a difference on all rivers. 135m ships can't sail on the Seine, and on my recent Bordeaux cruise the captain told me that is not because of the locks on the Seine but because 135m ships can't navigate some of the bends. Most companies use 110m cruise ships on the Seine as a result, Viking have built custom length ships a little longer (124m if I remember correctly but annoyingly Viking always quote in feet).

18 minutes ago, notamermaid said:

The MS Swiss Ruby certainly has a size advantage over both, she is only 85m long and 10m wide. Wonder what her draft is. She sails into Prague as Rebel54 has confirmed.

https://www.viva-*****/en/ships/ms-swiss-ruby

I rejected MS Swiss Ruby for a Seine cruise, I'm not about to cruise the Elbe on her. The Seine gets many of the old ships in Europe, and some of them like Swiss Ruby are cramped with very small cabins. Eventually companies had enough 135m ships for the Rhine/Danube system that they started to move 110m ships to the Seine, at which point some of them were nice enough we did a Seine cruise with Riviera.

[AnhaltER1960]

1 hour ago, notamermaid said:

Happy New Year to you!

 

You said in a different year that the length of the ship makes a difference on the Elbe, too, meaning manoeuvring the bends. I suppose between Croisi's and Viking's ships there is not much in it. Meyer Werft gives the Astrild and the Beyla with 110m length and 11.45m width. CroisiEurope says the Elbe Princesse II is 102m long and 11 metres wide.

 

The MS Swiss Ruby certainly has a size advantage over both, she is only 85m long and 10m wide. Wonder what her draft is. She sails into Prague as Rebel54 has confirmed.

https://www.viva-*****/en/ships/ms-swiss-ruby

 

notamermaid

 

True, length does matter. But, as you noticed, there is not much of a difference between the Viking ships and the Croisi ships. The difference is the itinerary. Croisi ships have to pass the "Domfelsen Magdeburg" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domfelsen  - a major obstacle in low water conditions.

 

Wikipedia give the draft of the Swiss Ruby at 1, 20 mtrs, (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scylla_(Reederei) ). This would lose her some of the advantage of being shorter. There are several tour operators, which sail all the way into Prague, but usually only once or twice a year. The only ones, which have a wider choice of dates, are Viking and CroisiEurope.

 

Oh yes, and a happy new year, too.

 

 

[AnhaltER1960]

Just to give an impression of the Christmas flood of the Elbe. The photo, taken on Dec 31st, shows Viking's Wittenberg docking place. One week before, Dec 25th, the last passengers disembarked the Viking Astrild there, before she moved (empty) downriver.  Just about in time, before they needed the xxl-wellies.

The Viking Beyla still seems to be stuck in Bohemia.

 

 

 

[notamermaid]

On 1/1/2024 at 10:44 PM, AnhaltER1960 said:

The Viking Beyla still seems to be stuck in Bohemia.

Perhaps she was not allowed to sail. Dresden was above Höchster Schifffahrtswasserstand until the afternoon of the 30th. The level did go down over New Year's Eve but is now back up to 564cm. The Upper Elbe and the Vltava still being high (the latter a bit better upstream from Prague than yesterday) this is not going to be good, especially with the temperatures dropping unpleasantly low. At least the rain should stop with you as well as in the West.

 

notamermaid

 

 

[notamermaid]

Let us have a look at how the river did at Dresden in December:

 

Compared to the Rhine and the Danube, the Elbe did not see the high rise in November. Starting from the comparatively lower baseline at the beginning of December the river could take the high volume which we also saw at the other rivers, and which they struggled to drain off. But in the end as rain and warm temperatures persisted the Elbe followed suit with flooding and going over the line for a river traffic ban. Which is the line HSW. I did not follow this up so know no more details of what actually happened over Christmas. The situation eased a bit but the level remained high with the Vltava staying on high levels, too.

 

And the levels remain high.

 

notamermaid

 

 

[notamermaid]

Time to move on to 2024.

 

So to end just a thank you to all who have contributed or taken an interest in this thread in the background. Special thank you to @AnhaltER1960 for helping us the past year again as our man on the ground in the East of Germany.

 

notamermaid

 

 

[OwenSmith]

Is there a 2024 thread yet?

[notamermaid]

6 minutes ago, OwenSmith said:

Is there a 2024 thread yet?

Not yet. Give me a couple of days. Our esteemed host has promised to put all three up again in a link - a pinned thread - at the top of the river cruising front page. But of course they will appear at the top of the unpinned threads when they are first written.

 

Talk to you there.

 

notamermaid