November 1st to November 9th
We ended up anchoring only 2 more nights on the Tom Bigbee Waterway, because we pushed our last day and went 100 miles all the way to Mobile. We were all pretty unsure about the anchoring ahead of us since we had heard so many stories about difficulties in getting anchors to hold, shallow waters, debris in the anchorages, and barge traffic in the middle of the night. I was dreading the next few nights.
The first night we anchored at Bashi Creek, which was a skinny little anchorage. Rae and Steve Mason from Barefoot Shoes are the King and Queen of Anchoring. We let them go in first to check it out and in about 20 minutes, they had tied up the bow and stern of their boat to some trees on the shore. Actually, Rae took their dinghy and tied lines from their boat to the trees and got covered in river mud! River mud is really disgusting; it just adheres to everything and you have to scrub to get it off. They radioed us and told us they were ready for us to come in. They were sideways in the skinny anchorage and we tied onto their boat with fenders between us. This brings new meaning to be close to your neighbors! Then a sailboat we had been seeing along the river came in and we invited them to tie up to us. You can see by the pictures how cozy it was.
The second night was an anchorage at “Ole Lock 1”. It was pretty deep there and we had to set our anchor a second time until we felt good about our position. There was a boat ramp on the shore and after a drink at Barefoot Shoes, Roger and I took Louie in our dinghy to the ramp. I got out of the dinghy, had one foot in the water and a wave knocked me forward and I fell on to the boat ramp. I was drenched and had 2 new black and blue marks. Roger thought I was a klutz, but I blamed it on the wave.
We were about 100 miles from Mobile, AL and everyone just wanted to get off the river. If the river hadn’t been so winding, we probably would have only been 40 miles from Mobile! You can see on one of the photos that the river had some really sharp bends. But fortunately the current was going with us and while the boat was going only 6.7 mph, the current helped us by adding another 3.1 mph to carry us at 9.8 mph. So we made it to Mobile, AL by dusk. It was a long day, 11 hours underway!
We got permission to dock in front of the Mobile Convention Center, almost at the mouth of Mobile Bay, but still on the river! There was a naval shipyard directly across from us, and it was a beautiful evening with a full moon and lights along the shores of the channel. But the river wouldn’t let us go away that easily. Before we even went to bed, we had logs hitting the hull of the boat. They were trapped between the boat and the dock. I went outside in my pajamas to help Roger move them away from the boat with the boat hooks. I put my life jacket on….just in case. They were huge logs and I didn’t know that Roger got up 3 times in the night to move them away! We also felt the wake of some passing towboats and barges and the boat rocked a few times pretty badly!
The next morning we went into Turner Marine in Mobile and stayed for 3 nights. We arranged for our mail and some engine parts to be shipped there and had an engine mechanic take care of a problem we had developed at the beginning of the trip. Roger had band-aided the problem for the time being. We totally lucked out. This mechanic had the bolt removed and the replacement bracket on in 1-1/2 hours. Roger did a bunch of other fix-it things and then did TMG work for a couple of days.
We celebrated Judy Campbell’s birthday (from Jejuda, they had traveled with us through the fish barrier and elsewhere along the rivers). It was spur-of-the-moment. Everyone brought their own food and we had dinner on our boat. We didn’t have a cake, but I had some refrigerated Toll House chocolate chip cookies and baked them so we would have something when we sung Happy Birthday to Judy.
The days are running into each other now. It’s ok if I don’t know the date, but it’s driving me crazy that I don’t know the day of the week. So I can’t tell you which day it was, but on the fourth morning, we left Turner Marine and headed out of Mobile Bay toward the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. The Bay was really choppy, but Roger adjusted our course so that the seas weren’t abeam of us for very long. When the waves hit our boat on the side of it (abeam), rather than from the front or the back, then our boat rocks back and forth like a toy tugboat in a bathtub. I gave Louie a couple of ginger snaps to help him get through it.
That night we went to another anchorage and it was terrific. There were dolphins in this little bay called “Ingram Bayou“. I could never get the camera out quick enough to take their picture!
On Saturday, we went into Pensacola where we knew that we were going to have to stay for several days until the weather from “Ida” cleared through the area. We are staying at the Navy Yacht Club, at Bayou Grande Marina, on the Naval Air Station in Pensacola. It’s a great deal for retired or active military people. The slip fees are reasonable, the facilities are clean and the docks are in great shape. The laundry is FREE! It usually costs me about $10-$12 a week – in quarters – to do our laundry.
Yesterday we went to the Naval Air Museum on the base. It was fantastic and if you are in the Pensacola area, you shouldn’t miss it. There are planes from every era and war there. Short videos in each area explain the various displays. There was one section on Vietnam POW’s and I spent ½ hour there alone. On display were the shirts that some of our POW’s wore during their imprisonment, plus poems they wrote and lots of other “mementoes” they carried out with them when they were freed. It was so touching.
Today we prepared our boat for the storm. It has been downgraded to Tropical Storm Ida, but I’m still not looking forward to it. We have lines tied every which way on the dock and every fender we own is out between the boat and the dock. Everything that can be put away is stowed. It’s been raining and I can see the weather coming in. It should be here after 10:00 p.m. (of course in the dark!) and last through a good part of the day tomorrow. I told Roger that I would prefer to rent a car, get a hotel room for a few days, get my hair highlighted and cut, maybe even a manicure and pedicure. Is that really asking for much?? He said that if I really wanted to, I could do that, but he was staying with the boat! We’ll see how this goes. Right now, the winds are gusting and the boat is moving around, kind of jerking us back and forth. The water in the marina is high, and it’s going to be a rough night, I just know it. Every time the boat jerks hard, Louie and I look at each other, like “Oh no, I hope it’s not going to get worse than this” and Roger keeps on talking business on his cell phone, unfazed. The thing is that the storm hasn’t even come close to us yet and I’m already jittery. It’s pretty late in the season for this weather, but timing is everything!
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