We appear to have a weather window to get to Gdańsk, something we didn’t achieve last year. Gdansk is approximately 200 along the coast of Poland almost to Russia, we were just 15 miles from Russian territorial waters at the closest point. First stop 50 miles is Kolobrzeg, just one night as our window was closing with a storm coming in. The town is a big tourist town in Poland and very busy.

We set off this morning only to find our depth instrument has stopped working, in the shallow waters round here this is the last thing you need to break. On a positive front after my mast climbing yesterday, I can confirm that we now know what the wind is doing. Wind instruments are nice but not essential, it’s very easy to tell the strength and direction of the wind, depth information is essential and we don’t have it. Last year I cast a lead line so at lea...

Wolin was only 8 NM as a white headed Eagle flys from our anchorage but as these Lakes and rivers are so shallow we sailed 19NM by the time we arrived. A deep keel yacht would not be able to get here as we saw depths of 1.7 m we are 1.5 m so no problems. We saw a number of Eagles on route, the scariest thing was, we saw land sticking up out of the water when the charts said there should be 2.7 m of depth, so we stopped cutting the corners. Wolin is a large island...

After 4 days in Szczecin in almost no wind we motored to the fuel dock and filled our tanks, then back up the river to the village of Stepnica. There was some sort of family event going on when we arrived. We took the bicycles for a run round and we thought it was a very poor village with a lot of derelict buildings. Only 2 restaurants, we went in the large one, 2 meals, 2 drinks and a side salad for £12.00 unfortunately not very nice. When we got back to Bunny ...

Szczecin has been a trading port since the 9 th century and today is the 7 th largest city in Poland. It’s still a major port and a ship building centre even though it’s a long way from the sea. Despite heavy bombardment during WW2 there are a lot of historical monuments to see dating back to the 14 century, they have made a route round them all, over 5 kilometres marked with a red line on the pavement 41 places of interest. We took 2 days cycling round. Our...