This eagerly awaited sequel to Watersteps Through France and Watersteps Round Europe is the spellbinding story of the Coopers' voyage by barge from the North Sea, eastbound across flooded France, down the Rhine, through the new Rhein-Main-Donau Kanal, and down the Danube to the Black Sea.
As if floods, whirlpools, and groundings were not enough, vandals cast them off in Germany, and the flooding Danube swept them downstream at breakneck speed. Bureaucratic delays in Hungary pushed them over the Yugoslav border on the very day that war broke out; they evaded diesel pirates, only to become bogged down in the massive bureaucracy of Bulgaria, Romania and the Ukraine, where sailing your boat is not yet a citizen's right.
This is a breathtaking and witty account of a voyage that turned out more difficult and dangerous than any of the Coopers' ocean crossings.
