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 11th
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 12th
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 13th
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 29th. We are leaving for Europe on the 28th, 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 10th, we will spend a week at home (wherever that might be) in Indy and then head back to the boat around October 19th.
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 32nd parallel until November 1st, 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?
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