JOURNAL - DAY 11

DAY 11:

Richard says:

"Still on the Slapy! It seems to go on for ever. This particular stretch meanders lazily all the way to the dam. From my camp site at KM 126 I plodded NE towards Prague eventually coming to familiar territory around Zivohost. We learned to paddle here last year and what we thought were huge expanses of water then now seem very small. As it is not the weekend the river is wonderfully empty other that the odd squadron of Sentinels.

The highlight of the day was being offered a pivo by a couple of old boys as I paddled past Nova Zivohost on my way to my planned camp site at Zivohost KM 102.

Finishing at Charles Bridge (km 50) at 1100 on Friday 22 May is immovable so I plan to paddle on Friday from Branik (KM 61) leaving at 0800 to cope with weirs etc. This means the I have 41 KM to cover in the next 3 days.

I hesitate to say this but it is not raining!"

Petra says:

"Although it might sound a bit trite, every day one can indeed learn something new. As I was browsing websites dedicated to Vltava and its sights, I found a site that once again ties this whole paddling project of the Czech Few closer to what happened in Czechoslovakia almost 7 decades ago.

Vltava Line:

Even to these days you can come across the remains of a fortification system that was supposed to help the Czechoslovak army defend their country in 1938. You can run across them mainly near the borders but also in Prague and other places. Today they are lonesome ferroconcrete monsters, mostly covered by moss, sometimes scrawled by sprayers.
They remind us of very meaningful and grievous events from the Czechoslovak history. Today only few fans are informed about the reasons which caused a construction of one of the most perfect fortification systems in the world during the thirties of the 20th century and their story of devotedness.
Adolf Hitler had won the elections in Germany in 1933. The young Czechoslovakia had to secure its borders against a surprise German attack. There were two concepts how to do it. The first one - to build a large mobile army, and the second one - to build border fortresses. The first one had a big disadvantage. Czechoslovakia was too small to build a mobile army powerful enough to stop the substantially bigger German army. However the second one had its disadvantages as well. Had the fort line been broken, there would not have been enough strength to prevent the enemy units from entering Czechoslovakia. The second concept won in the end, because of the idea that fortresses could have stopped the enemy as long as the Czechoslovak allied forces (French and British ones) entered the war with an attack against Germany from the west.
In fact the Czech engineers were influenced by the French Maginot Line (the Maginot Line was a system of French border fortresses being built from the early thirties to the beginning of the WWII), so some first types of the Czechoslovak fortresses looked much like the French ones. There were two main types of the fortification lines - the light one and the heavy one.

Plan of Czechoslovak fortification in the september 1938:

In blue one cas see where the fortification copied the Vltava River

Vltava Line was comprising of light forts: in the short period between April 30, 1938 and September 30, 1938 there were 333 of them built (their construction had to cease with the Munich Agreement signed on September 30, 1938). After the whole country was occupied by the Nazi Germany in March 1939, these forts were destroyed since the occupying powers were concerned they could be used by the rebelling population against them.

Demolition of the forts by Vltava in 1939

A few of the forts survived the demolitions in 1939 - one of them can be seen during low water conditions in the Slapy water reservoir (of course, the dam was not yet built in 1938 therefore the surviving remnants of the Vltava line are nowadays under the water)."