“The Move”  --  Now that it’s over….. I can talk about it.

 Monday, September 14^th – Monday, September 28^th

 

We left Green Turtle Bay in Lake Barkley, KY and got back to Indianapolis around 1:00 in the morning (Tuesday morning).  We had exactly 2 weeks to move before the closing of our Indy house.  For the entire 5 hours’ drive from the marina, I searched online for a place to rent. It’s been 15 years since we last moved, so the whole thing was a frightening task.

 

It took us 2 days to find a place, and we settled on renting a townhouse for a year in Carmel, in the Bridgewater development.  We found a place to live, found a storage unit, set up a mailbox at the UPS Store, lined up a mover, packed most of the house ourselves, and let the movers pack the rest.  Roger took 9 pick-up truck-loads of things to Goodwill, and 7 more truck-loads to the dumpster behind our former business, Flotronix.  I was awake every day by about 5:00 a.m. and Roger was coming up with any excuse he could to leave the house because he “had to do some thing or another”.  One day early on, I caught him standing in the unfinished part of the basement, just staring into space.  He was completely overwhelmed with all “the stuff”.  It was so funny!  But I knew that whatever we didn’t do, the movers would handle.  

 

In the meantime, our Hilton Head villa had sold and we had to deal with both homes at the same time.  Two inspections, repair estimates for two houses, two more negotiations, emails back and forth and back and forth.  One of my friends, Jodi Tibbett, came over to help me pack.  I offered her a cup of tea and wouldn’t let her stop to drink it – I was a slave-driver, but we had so much fun catching up and working at the same time.

 

The movers took 2-1/2 days to finish packing us, move a truckload into our 2^nd storage unit and then move the second truckload into the townhouse.  We did it! 

 

On Saturday, the day after we moved, we went to an engagement celebration for Brett, and his fiancée, Kelly Murphy.  It was a wonderful day!  They have tentatively set a date for next November.  Wait until you meet Kelly; we couldn’t possibly be any happier to have her in our family!

 

We spent the next day getting ready for our trip to Europe.  We knew that we wouldn’t be able to unpack until we returned in about 2 weeks.  It wasn’t a good feeling leaving the townhouse in such a mess, but we really had no other choice.  When we boarded the plane on Monday afternoon for Europe, it was almost a relief.  

 

We were amazed that we actually accomplished as much as we did in literally 1-1/2 weeks.  The boat was a million miles away for the time being.

Kentucky Lakes & Catastrophic Fire   

 

Thursday, September 10th

 

After clearing out of the Kentucky Lake and Dam area on Thursday, we got a call from Rae & Steve on Barefoot Shoes that they were slowing down so we could come by to pick up some homemade bread.  You can see the picture where they are passing bread in a bag on their boat hook to our other friends on Potest Fieri who were ahead of us.  Rae bakes while they are underway and she has treated us to lots of homemade chocolate biscotti, flatbread, and now homemade bread.  Lucky us!

 

That night we stayed at an anchorage on Kentucky Lake, and Roger and I hosed off the shad flies and continued to battle them for a good part of the day.  I do not ever want to do that again.  Even Roger who takes bugs and stuff in his stride said, “This is something from an Alfred Hitchcock movie!”

 

Friday, September 11^th

 

The sunrise was beautiful.  I have not been able to sleep past 5:15 a.m. even on our easy days.  We headed over toward Green Turtle Bay Marina, which was an easy ride through the Barkley Canal over to Barkley Lake.  This is a resort community, with a huge marina, 3 pools, condominiums, health club.  And the price per foot was the same as Hoppie’s (that beat-up old barge on the Mississippi!).  We planned to stay for 3 nights.

 

We went to the pool in the afternoon and that night we went to a theater and listened to 2 Storytellers perform.  That was more entertaining than we expected.

 

Saturday, September 12^th

 

The guys were cleaning our boats that morning, and the girls went shopping in the really small town of Grand Rivers, KY.  While we were in the one of the shops, we heard sirens and someone said it was coming from Green Turtle Bay.  We decided to go back to the marina and as we got closer, we saw that smoke was coming from the docks.  I parked the car along the road, and we started running toward the docks in a near panic.

 

The short story is that a power boat had just blown up about 100 feet behind our boat.  Apparently, the guy and his girlfriend had fueled up, pulled away from the dock and had some engine problems.  Something ignited and there was a huge explosion.  It blew the top of the boat up in the air and it fell back down onto the hull.  Roger and some other guys heard this, saw the lady on fire and were yelling at her to jump into the water.  She was screaming about her boyfriend being on the boat, but she finally jumped in, and our friend Steve from Barefoot Shoes jumped in and swam her away from the burning boat over to the dock.  She was severely burned and her boyfriend died on board.  It was just awful.

 

Then Tow Boat U.S. got involved, managed to hook a line onto the burning boat and moved it over to the other side of the marina.  More bad news:  their lines got wrapped around one of their props, and incapacitated Tow Boat U.S. while it was towing the burning boat.  So Roger and Danny from Potest Fieri got into our dinghy, tied a line  onto the Tow Boat U.S. boat and moved both boats away from the docks.  They let go of the tow boat when one of the engines got free and started.  As if things weren’t bad enough, the tow boat lines got tangled again, they lost both their engines and THE TOW BOAT CAUGHT ON FIRE, so the two guys on that boat jumped into the water.  The original burning boat and the tow boat floated toward the docks again, and caught a houseboat, dinghy and 2 jet skis on fire.  The volunteer firemen were doing what they could, but it wasn’t looking good.  Their hoses weren’t long enough, equipment malfunctioned and there was chaos.  Roger used our dinghy anchor as a grappling hook to tow one of the burning jet skis away from the docks and it eventually burned itself and sunk below the water.  

 

I was with the girls as watched from shore and were panicked that the whole dock would catch or there would be more explosions.   Somehow all the fires smoldered into the water or the firemen put them out.  People were in shock, including all of us.  Susan and I nearly killed our husbands for getting so close to the fire, but we were at the same time proud of them for being so brave and helping in this situation.  Not to mention Steve, who brought the woman to safety.  

 

Sunday, September 13^th

 

We hoped that this would be a boring day.  Thankfully, it was somewhat.  We cleaned the boat in the morning and sat by the pool in the afternoon.  In the meantime, we had received an offer on our Hilton Head villa over the weekend and found out that we had reached a deal on that.  In the afternoon, we also received an offer on our Indianapolis house and were in the negotiation process.  What was the chance that both homes would sell within a couple of days of each other? 

 

Monday, September 14th

 

So we are at the crossroads.  We were planning to leave Green Turtle Bay Marina today anyway and head south for one more week.  But now that has changed, and we will head home today!  We agreed to sell the Indianapolis home this morning, but here’s the clincher…. we have to be moved out by September 29^th.  We are leaving for Europe on the 28^th, so it will work out okay.  We have to really scramble to find an apartment or condo to rent, and line up movers.    

 

We are leaving the boat here with a list of items for the service department to work on, and for that we do not have to pay for dock space for the 5 weeks that we will be gone.  After we get back from Europe on October 10^th, we will spend a week at home (wherever that might be) in Indy and then head back to the boat around October 19^th.   

 

So the 5-week hiatus for our blog “Living the Dream” begins now, and the 5-week hiatus from Happy Hour with our boating friends also begins.  If all goes well, we will be back on the boat by 10/19 and continue on down the beautiful Tennessee River.  The timing will work out well, because we cannot be south of the 32^nd parallel until November 1^st, after hurricane season.  This is dictated by our insurance company.  

 

Wish us luck ---  there is a lot to do in the next 2 weeks!  I’ll miss writing this, and I already can’t wait to be back on board.  That says a lot, doesn’t it?

 

 Moving Down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers

 

Sunday, September 6, 2009 through Thursday, September 10th

 

Reluctantly, we left the civilization in Grafton, IL for our journey down the Mississippi.  We ended up covering 218 miles in 3 days.   After the first 60 miles, our first overnight on Sunday was at Hoppies, in Kimmswick, MO, an old barge that is renowned with “Loopers” as a colorful stop.  Hoppie is the last descendant from a family of “Light Keepers” who would shine lanterns along the shore of the Mississippi so the river traffic wouldn’t run aground in the dark and fog.  Fern, Hoppie’s wife, gave us navigational tips for the next few days ahead of us.

 

On Monday, we had a short trip of 40 miles to the Kaskaskia Lock and Dam.  We got permission to tie up along the wall and that was a good stop.  Danny from “Potest Fieri” brought his dinghy over to take us ashore so Louie could take care of business.

 

On Tuesday, we traveled our longest distance in one day – 117 miles.  The Mississippi had a 4+ knot current in our favor!  I took a picture of the chart plotter showing our speed at 11.3 knots (around 13.5 miles an hour).  We thought we were going to need our seatbelts!  We anchored in “Angelo’s Towhead”, near Cairo, IL.  We were at the end of the Mississippi and at the mouth of the Ohio River.  If you look closely at the picture, you will see that 3 states and two rivers all converge in this small area.  We had a nice night at the anchorage and it became obvious that Danny is now Louie’s new best friend.  After “holding it” for 12 hours, once again Danny “rescued” Louie when he pulled up with his dinghy.

 

Wednesday was a stressful day for me.  We chugged up the Ohio River for 46 miles, going against the current.  We could hardly go 6 mph and then had to speed up (a relative term) to make it through the lock in the afternoon.  The lockmaster was determined to lock through all the pleasure boats in between the towboats that he had stacked up.  So there were 4 trawlers and 4 small fishing boats floating in this lock trying to stay away from each other while the lockmaster brought the water level up 10 feet.  It seemed to take forever.

 

One of major contributors to my stress level was that there was only one anchorage that we could reach that night, and the cruising guide said that it might be low on water.  The water level on the rivers fluctuates by the hour, the lockmaster told us.  Oh joy!  Well, it worked out well after all that worrying I did (Roger by the way, was not worried at all).  We stopped at the city dock at Paducah, KY and decided NOT to ask permission to overnight there.  No one kicked us out and we had a great night there.  We walked up the riverbank to the town and ate dinner at a nice seafood restaurant.  It was timely because I was pretty down, feeling as if I had joined the cast on “Survivor – Great Loop”.  A nice shower and dinner served by someone else does wonders for the psyche… And then we woke up to a boat that had been swarmed (thank God, on the outside!) by these flying creatures called Shad Flies.  Just take a look at the photo!!

 

At cocktails last night, we decided to cut down the Tennessee River (rather than go around to the Cumberland River).  The cruising books said that we might have a long wait at the Kentucky Lock, but we took our chances and Roger was really nice to the lady lockmaster.  She locked us through in just ½ hour and we have heard horror stories of boats waiting 4-5 hours to lock through at Kentucky Lock and Dam.  We saved 25 miles by going that way!  

 

The rivers seem to be getting better as we put them behind us and go to the next.  The Mississippi was better than the Illinois River (marginally).  The Ohio was better than the Mississippi, with water that was not as muddy but a current that was against us.  And we are now on the Tennessee River in Kentucky Lake area, which is just beautiful.  We are looking forward to the rest of the trip where we expect anchorages and marinas to be more available and have a little less commercial traffic and more to see on land.  

 

Meeting the towboats on the rivers is really exciting.  It takes our boat a long time to pass one and we have to watch for them as they try to go around the bends on the Mississippi especially.  They are pushing barges that are sometimes 1000 feet long  x 200 feet wide.  On those sharp bends, they have to back up, go forward, back up, go forward (like getting out of a parallel parking spot).

 

One thing we did learn on these rivers (especially the Mississippi and the Ohio where there is a ton of towboat traffic) to speak “Tow” --- not “Thai”, not “Taiwanese”, but “Tow”, a special language all its own.  You can see from some of the pictures how important it is to communicate with the captains of these tows (you call them tows, don’t call them tugs!).  Roger, who can make his way through Canadian French and Brazilian Portuguese, has in fact mastered “Tow”.  The only thing he cannot get is the lazy, word-garbling tones.  He’s much too distinct, but here’s a flavor of it.  He looks for the name of the towboat in his binoculars, then he starts the dialogue R=Roger, T=Tow Captain:

 

R:  “Upbound Harwell Tow, downbound pleasure boat Karen Anne at Thompson’s Landing Daybeacon, Channel 13.”   

 

T:  “Har..”

 

R:  “Cap’n, Karen Anne is downbound, where would you like us?”

 

T:  “See y’all on the one whistle.”

 

R:  “Thanks, Cap’n, see you on the one.”

 

For those of you who don’t speak “Tow” (let alone “Boat”), that means we will pass each other, port-to-port (the left side of his boat will greet the left side of our boat as we pass each other).  Hey, you ask, why didn’t he just say, “Pass me on my left side?  Who knows?  This boating life is a country of its own, trust me.

 

 Making Headway Down the Illinois

 

Wednesday, September 2nd – JUST LIKE “DELIVERANCE” !!

 

At 7:00 a.m. we left in the fog, but it burned off fairly quickly.  We met two guys probably in their very early 20’s at “Starved Rock Lock”.  They “locked through” behind our boat and I had the chance to ask them what in the hell they were doing in the Illinois River in a freakin’ canoe!!  They told me they were going to New Orleans.  I said that if I were their mother, I would drive to the riverbank, make them get in my car and take them right back home!!  Think about it – they have no beds, no shower, no bathroom, and unbelievably, no VHF radio.  They have no way to communicate with the lock masters or tugboats or anyone!  I couldn’t talk them out of going home, and we went on our way.   

 

We caught up with 3 boats from the previous day and went 65 miles to Hamm’s Holiday Harbor Marina, Rome, IL.  It sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?  Our first view of the harbor was the “dead” paddleboats; we figured it must be a graveyard for those huge steamships that no longer work.  That should have tipped us off, but we were committed by then.  The cruising guide wrote positive things about this location:  it said there was a restaurant (but it was closed), laundry facilities (they must have been referring to the hose on the dock), restrooms with showers (only one worked and it was unisex I guess—I wouldn’t go near there)….well, you get the picture.  We tied up to a dock that was smashed in 3 different spots, had metal posts to tie up to that were pulling away from the dock and looked liked they’d snap any second.  Plus we had 2 picturesque work barges beside us.  What a delightful spot.   You’ll see it in the Trip Photos.  I know I heard some banjos in the woods!  

 

That night, Roger checked the engine room and found that oil had blown out into the bilge – not good.  He suspected that we had been running too hard at 2500 rpm, and couldn’t identify the source of the blow-out.  I was worried and didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but Roger seemed calm and told me he would check it in the morning. 

Thursday, September 3^rd

 

We left “Deliverance-Land” as early as we could – 6:30 a.m.  Not too long into the trip, an engine alarm sounded.  Now what!?  We slowed down, I took the helm and Roger went into the engine room.  Everything looked ok, compared to yesterday’s oil blowout, and after about 10 looooonnngggg minutes, the alarm stopped.  Roger checked on it every couple of hours and everything seemed okay.  

 

Late afternoon, we stopped at a barge and tied up.  Susan Godin from another boat called “Potest-Fieri” and I took our dogs to shore.  Louie had held it for nearly 11 hours!!  We edged our way along the 

barge, trying not to fall into the disgusting brown river on one side and trying not to impale ourselves with the broken cables on the other side, climbed up incredibly steep metal steps and finally got some green grass.  On the way back to the boat, we noticed that Louie was covered with burrs.  Oh, poor dog.  None of us were happy there, plus they wanted to charge us $36 for the night. 

 

We decided to move down the river about 2 more miles, where we caught up with “Barefoot Shoe” in an anchorage.  We also anchored, had cocktails on our boat and then Danny Godin and Roger took the dogs ashore one last time for the night.  Everyone was covered in mud, including Danny’s dinghy!  What a mess.  By the time I got Roger and Louie cleaned up, I had about 8 mosquito bites.  It had been a long, long day, but we went 93 miles and were happy to be making such good distance.  We ended up eating a light dinner and went to bed at 9:00 so that Roger could take a good look in the engine room early the next morning.

Friday, September 4^th

 

At 6 a.m., Roger replaced a damaged impeller.  I helped him by drinking my coffee – I’m useless without that first cup.  Then he found another problem – 2 bolts sitting in the bilge – not where they were supposed to be!  They came off the engine casing, so he messed with those and cleaned up some of the oil that had spilled.

 

Danny came over in his dinghy to pick me up so that I could take Louie to the bathroom.  I went barefoot because he said my shoes would only get stuck in the mud.  His dinghy had gone from white to all-brown inside.  I had a feeling I was in for a fun dog walk.  Oh God, I got out of the dinghy and stepped in mud – who knows how deep!!  To avoid sinking in, I lunged up the embankment and grabbed onto tree roots and pulled myself out of the mud.  I had visions of death by quicksand, just like the old movies.  I really held back on the expletives, because I hardly know this guy who was so nice to take us ashore.  Danny handed me Louie by the handle on his lifejacket and I carried him up the hill to a flat spot where he could take care of business.  I dreaded going back down to the mud and nearly propelled myself face first into the dinghy right after Louie landed in there!  Anchoring with a dog is NOT FUN!!

 

Anyway, we traveled 85 miles today and landed at Grafton, IL marina.  Roger & I usually take turns showering on our boat when the other person is driving.  By the time we tie up for the night, that is one less thing we have to do.

 

I can tell you right now…that the Illinois River is so boring!!  We motored 85 miles and finished the Illinois today, after traveling 327 miles on it.  In Grafton, IL we are at Mile Marker 0.00.  Even the guys agree with us girls that they cannot wait to get off the rivers – the Illinois, the Mississippi and the Ohio River.  We stayed here for two nights.  It’s a great marina with normal people and normal boats.  There is civilization here, finally!!

 

Saturday, September 5th

 

In the morning I did 4 loads of laundry while Roger worked in the engine room.  He had done as much as he could and we will have a mechanic look at it when we get to the Kentucky Lakes area.

 

After laundry, I borrowed another pick-up truck from the owners of the marina.  This is getting to be a habit!!   Rae Mason from “Barefoot Shoes” and Susan Godin from “Potest Fieri” were with me and we stocked up on groceries at two grocery stores, and homemade pie and fruit from a roadside stand.  Back at the marina, it was Labor Day Weekend, and there was a band playing and lots of drunk and crazy boaters!  It sounds just like a day at home, doesn’t it?

 

Sunday, September 6^th

 

Our jaunt down the Mississippi will be 218 miles, but the current is fast, and going in our favor.  We are hoping to be off of “the Miss” in 3 days.  One of the problems, as I’ve said, is that on these 3 rivers, we have to plan our itinerary very carefully.  There are so few marinas, so we shall see what is ahead of us next!