Costi Susac, captain of passenger river transport ships - Navrom, Tulcea, Romania
One winter we left with Maramures [ship] from here and the Danube was already frozen solid until Chilia. And from Chilia we couldn’t go any further and we stayed there. We called the city hall, they brought us water by tanker, luckily we had diesel.
We stayed there for two months. They would periodically bring us water by tanker. Nothing was moving on the Danube. Russian, Ukrainian icebreakers never break ice in winter, they leave it as it is. And at one point, when it started moving, a big ice floe came towards us. We were standing there and watching because there was nothing we could do to it. We all went out onto the pontoon. It hit the boat, pushed itself into the boat, raised the pontoon, made the scaffolding like that, that big metal scaffolding that’s there and stopped in front of us. If it went to the border police pontoon, it would be a disaster. But you can imagine the moments we went through when we saw that ice floe coming towards the ship. It bent the scaffolding, the thick sheet metal was V shaped.
Passenger is the local name for the Navrom ships that transport passengers from Tulcea on the three arms: Chilia, Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe.
