Out of the Rivers & Into the Gulf of Mexico

 November 1^st to November 9^th   

 

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!

 

“Locking” Our Way South to Mobile, Alabama

 October 23^rd to October 31^st

This part of the trip has been pretty uneventful.  Frankly, we cannot wait to get off the rivers and into Mobile, AL.  We have been pushing on every day, trying to stay ahead of an influx of about 60 “Loopers” who will leave the AGLCA Rendezvous and head south also.  We have been leaving every morning between 7:00 and 7:15 a.m. at the first light of day, and always plan to stop no later than 5:00 p.m. because by the time we tie up for the night, it is dark at 6:30.  We’ve been averaging about 56 miles per day; one day was long, 69 miles.

 

Luckily, we have been able to stay at marinas every night for nine nights, except for one night.  That was Thursday night and we had to anchor in a finger off the river.  We’d made the mistake of takin our dinghy motor off the dinghy to redistribute the weight on the stern of our boat.  We figured we could just row the dinghy to shore where Louie could take care of “his business.”  At this one place though, we had to anchor further up the river than we’d originally planed.  So instead of rowing to the public boat ramp, we could only row to the shore on either side of our boat.  (Actually, there was no “we”.  Roger did all the rowing.)  It was a disaster – slippery rocks or muddy shore!  We chose the muddy shore, Louie was desperate, but it was way, way, way worse than the last time in September!  Roger was literally stuck up to his knees in the muck trying to get back into the dinghy!  We have 3 more nights of anchoring ahead of us before we get to Mobile.  We’ll either put the motor (which is heavy, even with the boom lift) on the dinghy or Louie will have to use the lavatory facilities on board (piddle pads).  No more going ashore unless we see a boat ramp nearby.

 

We discovered that the “marinas” can be interesting places too.  Roger & I pulled into one marina in Alabama and the people running it were just as nice as they could be.  I think Good Morning America did a special profile on dental hygiene in rural areas of the South.  It was kind of sad and I was amazed --- one guy had teeth --- but only 2 teeth!  Another guy courteously picked up the lid of the trash can for me.  I put the bag in there and quickly looked away, and he said, “Yup --- what you saw was a ____ (I didn’t quite get it  -- maybe it was the Southern accent).  I said, “you mean A SNAKE ??!!!  I’d caught it out of the corner of my eye in the trash, but I wouldn’t look at it.  Proudly he said, “Yup --- I shot it 4 days ago.  It was trying to get inside the office.”  Ohhhh-----isn’t this fun now????

 

The good news is that we caught up to Barefoot Shoes, our friends from Canada, on our 6^thnight out.  We celebrated our re-connection with drinks and dinner on our boat.  I had brought some homemade sauce and meatballs from home and cooked spaghetti for the 4 of us.  We drank well, ate well and laughed all evening.  We’ve been traveling with Rae & Steve since Monday night, and Rae is spoiling us.  She’s made chocolate biscotti, apple crisp, and date bars.  She’s going to make all of us fat while she stays tiny!

 

“LOCKING”

 

WARNING:  If you are not interested in this concept of locking up and locking down the waterways, you might want to skip to the end of this and go right to the trip photos.  

 

Prior to this trip, neither Roger nor I had much experience in locking.  We locked a few times in our 21-foot Boston Whaler Conquest on the Ohio River during Coast Guard Auxiliary patrols, but that was it (and you know how enthusiastic I was about patrols!!).  Since we first started this journey, we have gone through 25 locks.

 

In the past 11 days, we had locked 12 of those times!  It’s pretty stressful and Roger is not shy about yelling at me if I don’t “catch the bollard” on the first try.  (Okay, so maybe I yelled at him once or twice about getting the boat closer to the bollard.)  But I’ve got it now.  I haven’t “missed” in the past 12 locks.  I even “locked under the influence” of just one cup of coffee.  That’s more dangerous than DUI, as anyone who knows me well, knows that I need 2 cups in the morning. 

 

If you’re wondering how boats “lock through”, I’ll try to explain it in laywoman’s terms.  Sorry guys, I am the one writing this blog.

 

Before you approach the lock, you call the “Lockmaster” on the radio to ask permission to lock through.  Sometimes you have to wait until other boat traffic comes out first --  the wait can be a few minutes or a few hours!  Once you see the green light and get permission, you enter the lock.  It’s hard to describe – it’s basically a wall on the right and on the left of you, with gates that open in front of you and close behind you.  When everyone is in the lock and tied up to the wall, the gates behind you will close and the lockmaster will either flood the chamber with water (to lock you –up) or drain it out (to lock you –down).  In the past 12 locks, we have locked down a total of 341 feet.  In most of the locks, we’ve dropped 30-40 feet each time, but we went through the James Whitten Lock the other day and dropped 84 feet!!  It was like taking an elevator from (above) the 8^th floor down to the basement!  But the difference is that you are standing on your boat, and the only thing keeping the boat from going every which way is the line that you are holding on to.  Here’s how we do it:

 

About a mile before the lock, I put on my life jacket and lower the 3 big orange ball fenders down either the starboard or port side of the boat.  Then I tie a line onto the cleat on the top of the deck, mid-ship, same side.  Roger drives into the lock and depending on the other boats ahead of us and some good forecasting, we hope the line and fenders are on the correct side and we discuss which “bollard” to tie on to.  The bollard is a structure (there are maybe 5 of them, evenly spaced, on each side of the walls of the lock) that you loop your line onto so that the boat stays in place.  The bollard moves downward (when locking down) according to the rate that the lockmaster sets for letting the water out of the lock.  

 

If we go too far to the front of the lock and the last bollard is missing, we’re in trouble.  It’s really hard to maneuver our boat in reverse and we need to get it right the first time.  So Roger edges up to the lock wall and I have the boat hook in one hand with the line on the tip of it and the other side of the line in my other hand.  I walk forward and try to “catch the bollard” early, while trying NOT to lose the line off the boat (sounds like it might have happened before, huh?) or drop the boat hook into the water.  I yell, “I’ve got it.  Take the !!@*&%!! BOAT HOOK,” calmly, really I am calm.  

 

Then Roger takes the line, holds us onto the wall and I use the boat hook to keep the boat from banging against the wall as the water drops.  In some locks, I have had to use all my strength to keep this 30,000 lb. boat from banging against the lock wall.  It’s a good thing my shoulder surgery was successful!  Once the water is out of the chamber and the level is the same as the level ahead of us outside the gate, the lockmaster opens the gates in front of us, sounds a horn, and we unhook ourselves from the bollard, push the boat off the wall and drive on down the waterway.  By the time we get to Mobile, Alabama into the Gulf of Mexico, we will be at sea level.  And there will be plenty of marinas, so they say!