Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Today was a great day to be on the water!

We pulled out of Kingfishers Marina in a light drizzle and cool (66 degree) weather about 6:30 this morning. The rain, which was never hard enough to cause us a problem, continued through the morning and the took turns with short periods of sunshine after lunch.

There wasn't a lot of wildlife to be seen, but at about 9:45, Glenda yelled "EAGLE!" and I grabbed  for the camera as the bald eagle flew across the river in front of us. I was able to get one picture just before he went behind the tree tops.





We saw only one other boat, a bass boat, on the water all morning, but the radio traffic let us know there were at least 3 other cruising boats coming upriver behind us. A couple of them had AIS transmitters, and I saw that they were travelling just slightly faster than we were. By around noon, when we passed 2 Southbound towboats with barges, the 4 of us were within about a mile of each other.

We stayed together to the Howell Heflin Lock and Dam, arriving there just after a towboat and barges locked down. The lockmaster was waiting on us with the gates open, and in short order all 4 of us were tied to the bollards and headed up 30 feet in altitude to the upper pool.



We had heard the lockmaster radio a sailboat that had grounded a couple of miles north of the dam, to check on their  welfare. As it turns out they  had been stuck there for almost 24 hours, in 5 feet of waterwith a boat that has a 5 1/2 foot draft. The other 3 boats leaving the lock radioed the grounded captain and offered to pass as close and as fast as they could, leaving as much wake as possible. This is normally a very rude thing to do, but if you are grounded, it sometimes rocks your boat enough that you can break free and power into deeper water. (I did not offer to help, as Genesis leaves only about a 6 inch wake at full speed.) After all three boats tried to rock him free, the captain reported a few inches of progress, so the first boat made a second pass, throwing about a 6 foot wake onto the stranded boat, raising it up and down while the captain put the engine in full reverse. A moment later he thanked everyone via the radio, reporting that he was ungrounded, and in 18' of water. There was no mistaking the joy in his voice!

While the other 3 captains decided to travel another 10 miles or so to anchor for the night, Glenda and I chose to stop at Warsaw Cutoff, at mile marker 275, at 3:30 this afternoon. We dropped anchor, and I tested flying the drone from the boat.


Glenda says:
Sooo thankful to be back on the water!  Between Tom working on the boat and doctors working on Tom I was not sure we would get to travel.  I told Tom early this morning " we're not talking about the future today, we are just going to enjoy the day" and we have. There was a nice cool breeze coming through the boat all day.  Now we are enjoying the quiet solitude of the water.  We took the dinghy out for a bit when we arrived.  We both needed a little exercise.   But with both of us in it it was hard to keep her straight.  It was just reassuring to know that I could get in and out of it from the boat.


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