Lauterbach, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, GermanyWe had a good night’s sleep but because we were asleep
so early we were awake by 06:30 and despite having a leisurely breakfast and
not rushing, we were on our way by 09:15.
The anchor came up cleanly which
makes this a gold star anchoring spot – it can be tedious washing off pound s
of mud! Our destination today was upwind of us, a harbour called Lauterbach on
the south coast of Rügen. We had read in the pilot books that there was an old
palace nearby and some fine old houses
and we thought it might be interesting to see them. Now what we did
today I guess underlines the fact that perhaps at heart I am a motoring man
rather than a sailor. Our initial direction through the buoyed channel was
definitely only engineable but when we turned to the north, with about 8 miles
to go, we could, just,have sailed. However we chose the engine as it was
faster, more predictable in terms of arrival times and as the wind direction
was so close to untenable, a few degrees shift would have meant the engine
anyway. As I said, I am a cruiser not a sailor and we were happy to take
advantage of the main to accelerate our progress, adding more than a knot but
the engine stayed on.
Confession over. The last few miles were 100% into the
wind so my rationale was why bother just for a few miles in the middle? True
sailors wouldn’t think that way but there again, at the time of typing this
(20:45) they would probably still be out there!
We arrived at 12:15 and as we were now in still
conditions, safely tied into a box berth, we had time to attend to our problem.
Our new electric toilet, which failed last year and which was replaced over
winter, was now leaking. Fortunately, it is only doing so on the infill (clean
water side) and not via the waste side. When I say attend to the problem, all I
could do really was curse and look for help. Very fortunately for us, here in
Lauterbach there is a full-sized service operation and some of the staff spoke
English, at least passingly and that together with my rudimentary German got us
the help we needed, an engineer was promised for 08:00 tomorrow. Now this
didn’t solve the problem for now but at least there was room for hope and that
put me in a much better frame of mind and we set off to explore a little.
Lauterbach is a fairly new village / town, dating back
to the 1830’s when Prince Wilhelm Malte of Putbus decided to build a landing
stage here to encourage people to come by sea to the nearby holiday complex at
Neuendorf that he was developing. Lauterbach is only a few km (2-3) from the
town of Putbus, where our prince had his home and who built the town in a
classicist style, painting all the buildings white and today it is known as the
‘Weiße Stadt’ or White Town. We walked up to the outskirts of Putbus just for the
exercise, passing an intriguing upside-down house as part of a tourist complex
for children. Having seen a couple of the buildings we decided to head back to
the boat, stopping in an Edeka we found to buy some fresh fruit and a couple of
other items.
I’ve yet to mention that just as we were leaving the
boat for our walk, we noticed that on the opposite, non-visitors’ pontoon, was
a definite visiting boat, it was Lapwing, from our rally and owned by Keith and Pat Churchward. There was no one
on board when we left and indeed, that was still the case upon our return but
at around 18:00, they were back and we called across. In less than 30 seconds
we were invited over for a drink and a chat. Their post rally experience was
very different from ours, they had simply relaxed in a number of small harbours
in the area and had had a really nice time of it. They were leaving for
Stralsund in the morning and were planning to stay there a couple of days. We
agreed to meet up there and go for a pizza on Wednesday evening. With that and
after a pleasant hour in their company we left to go back to prepare our meal,
new potatoes with a chicken salad and after, we watched the final and
disappointing episode of ‘Years & Years’ – shame, we ‘d enjoyed the series
but were left unsatisfied by the conclusion. C’est la vie.
2025-05-23