After 8 months on the hard “Fleetwood” is floating in the Danube again. My only preoccupation is with the stuffing box. It is leaking a lot more than normal. It could be that the dried out packing needs to expand in the water. I have tightened the nut on the stuffing box as far as I could. Anyway I’ll be sleeping on the boat tonight to keep an eye on it. I have another opportunity to change the packing tomorrow morning, because I’ll be lifted again to be put in a better mooring. Right now I am moored to a floating crane. There is a dredge on the river side of it and it will pull out tomorrow. Then the floating crane will lift me over steel wire rope mooring cables to put me in a better spot. The engine controls arrived today and I will go and fetch the package in the morning.

I am thinking of having a little go away party on the floating crane on Saturday for all the wonderful people that have assisted me here and then go across to Swishtov to go to mass on Sunday and then get on the road to the Black Sea.

Tuesday the second sail boat passed by going down stream. It was a small 24/26 foot German boat.  Last night I met three more bicycle Danube tourists, here at the  hotel. Leen Edelman from the outskirts of Nijmwegen, his lady friend Sabine from the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen and her daughter Anne Kathrin Will from Berlin. They are also on their way to the Black Sea port of Constanza. Delightful threesome. Anne Kathrin is a working lady, a professor in Philosophy and has just 4 weeks vacation. So, they had taken the train to Budapest and started their bicycle trek from there and will take the train back from Constanza. I mentioned that I was reading a book from the German author Herman Hesse, that was suggested by a Dutch friend when I shared with her my twin siblings conflict, I was groping for the title and the philosophy professor knew right away that it had to be “Narziss und Goldmund“. But I am three quarters through the book and have not quite made the connection. Goldmund is a happy go lucky who lives from one day to the next, without a plan, there I see a connection but not with the part where Goldmund sleeps with a trillion virgins and married women. But my twin is not anywhere Narziss. So, anyone has another suggestion?