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Week 29 & 30: Oct 8 - 22

10/24/2017

Taken on the Tennessee River by a fellow Looper. Don't worry....we have autopilot!

We are now in the tiny corner of the world where Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama meet on Pickwick Lake. We have been here for a week due to the always present ‘more repairs’ list. This time our props and drive shaft needed to be re-aligned….again. The culprits were logs floating just below the water surface that we had ‘found’ along the way on the rivers. We also needed both air conditioners worked on. We found that the forward A/C under our bed had a blocked drain and was now a bucket of rust from sitting in a pan of water for 12 years. UGGGGHHHHH! Why was this not found at our original survey???? So we’ll bleed some more money out for a new A/C. But it gets WORSE. While working on removing the rusted AC, we noticed a wet spot on the inside of our boat weeping some water through the hull at the bow below the water line!!! A small area inside hull in this area was actually soggy when the repairman felt it! So now we are THANKFUL for the A/C issue because we would never have known about the issue until the hull would have eventually crumbled and we would have sunk. So now we wait another 3-4 days for the hull repair, which of course, they believe is due to a bow thruster installation years earlier that our surveyor didn’t catch as well. Can you feel the love I have for the survey process. Ha!

I got a funny story about coming into Pickwick Lake last week. We got in the area a day early and decided to anchor out for a night before coming into the marina on our reserved date. We found a great cove that is popular with the local boaters, so there were about 6 boats there overnight. At 10:30 pm, three boats rafted together about 300 feet from us kept turning up their music (they had awesome speakers, btw) louder and louder to the point of being ridiculous. I couldn’t even hear Derek snoring right beside me in bed! Now I love to party and loud music doesn’t bother me…until they start playing songs from the 80’s. When ‘She’s Got Betty Davis Eyes’ starts blaring, it’s time for the madness to stop. So I pour a glass of wine, find the 1300-lumen spot light, have a seat on the back deck, and shine that puppy right on the offending boats. It was like instant daylight and I could see them start running around the boats like ants. After about 3 minutes of burning out their retinas, the music went off….and so did my light. The next morning, while the other boaters were still sleeping, we left for the marina and got settled into our slip. A few hours later….guess who comes into the slips right next to us. Yep. Nothing was said, but there were also no more music issues!

Since we were stuck in Iuka, MS for repairs, we decided to rent a car to do some shopping and see the sites. Tim and Patti from the boat CRAIC are also docked here with us, so the 4 of us set out together. We were in the turning lane, waiting to turn left against traffic, when a guy in a huge pickup waved us to go in front of him. We had just started the turn through and a car going about 45mph in the other lane plowed into us. The rental car is totaled, but thanks to seat belts and air bags, the 4 of us are unscathed. God is good. The lady who hit us may have a broken arm from her air bag deployment. Even though Derek got cited for failure to yield, we learned that the woman driver was on pain medication while driving. Life is like a box of chocolates.

Today we are in a cabin that we rented while the fiberglass repair is being done on the boat for the leak. I have to admit that we are enjoying all the ROOM….and the bathtub….and the big screen TV…..and the full kitchen…and the toilet that we can flush all we want! Even Gypsea is running around and sliding on the floors enjoying her new huge playground. The boat will seem a lot smaller to us when we go back aboard tomorrow.

On a very sad note, I just found out via Facebook this morning that our good friend Lou, who we met at Doziers Regatta Marina, passed away this past weekend. We had posted pictures of him and Kim on the blog when we were in Deltaville, VA for a month last June. We became very close to them both and enjoyed many evenings together. We were making plans to meet them again in the Bahamas in February. I don’t know the details of his death, but he was our age, full of life and laughter, and we feel privileged to have been able to know him for a short while. His favorite song was ‘I Can See Clearly Now’. Yes you can, Lou….yes you can.

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Week 27 & 28: Sept 23 - Oct 7

10/11/2017

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Ohio River

Rollin’….rollin’….rollin’ down the river!!! We have navigated the Mississippi, Ohio and Cumberland rivers, and now have entered the Tennessee River. Currently we are at Grand Rivers, KY in Green Turtle Bay Marina. These areas have been setting record-high temperatures (mid to high 80’s) and they have been dry as a bone until today. Water levels are way down, and unfortunately, these are not good conditions to get pretty fall foliage. But this part of Kentucky is beautiful and reminds me SO much of Beaver Lake that I find myself a little homesick. We will hang out here a couple more days until the rains from Hurricane Nate have passed.

Along with Edouard and Sabine (the Frenchies), we have been traveling alongside a couple from Ohio who are relatively new to the Loop, Tim and Patti. She was a hospice nurse, so we have that same sort of twisted (?) humor that comes along with the profession. They have a labradoodle named Riley who is getting to know Gypsea in small increments….more for his benefit than hers!

Our friendship got physically close to Tim and Patti when our boats collided on the Mississippi River! Donna Mae was already anchored facing the current in an area that was once 15 feet deep, but now only 5-7 feet due low water levels. Tim and Patti were the last to arrive at the anchorage. As Tim was searching for an adequately deep spot to anchor near us, and listening to directions from Edouard, he ended up perpendicular in front of us with his beam (side) against the strong current. The current carried his boat about 50 feet sideways right over our anchor line which caught his rudder which swung his boat into our bow. Patti and I, thinking we had super-human strength, were trying to push 24,000-lb boats apart at the railings while Derek was frantically dropping the anchor line with the windlass. Luckily, our anchor line didn’t get wrapped around his propellors which would have caused both our boats to be hooked together, incapacitated, and moving down the Mississippi at 5-6 knots into the barge traffic. The damage is only a small gash on our bow at the water line made by Tim’s swim platform as the boats made contact. We’ll fix it when we can, but for now it serves as another war wound with a story to tell and a lesson to remember about NEVER underestimating how the current can take total control over a boat.

Two other blog-worthy incidences have happened during our week-stay at Green Turtle Bay. First, a few nights ago we had Edouard and Sabine over for dinner, and as always, imbibed in a couple bottles of wine. After dinner, Derek poured everyone coffee and went to sit down on the foot stool. He plopped on the edge of the stool, it shot out from underneath him, and the full cup of coffee came straight up out of the cup as he went straight down on his butt onto the floor. The scene ended with the coffee coming back down on top of him like an avalanche. We all couldn’t help but laugh, admittedly at him instead of with him, but he took it in stride. Soon after, the Frenchies left and I took Gypsea out on her leash to talk to other Loopers that were congregated on the dock near our slip. A lady with a black cat (also on a leash) had unknowingly walked up behind us. Gypsea turned, saw only the golden eyes of the black cat in the dark, and jumped right in the lake!!! Luckily, I could pull her out by her harness and leash. She looked pitiful, all wet hair and huge eyes, clinging desperately to my shirt. When I brought her back to the boat, Derek was lying down saying his head felt funny and there was blood on the pillow case. Little did we realize that he had hit the back of his head on the drawer knob when he fell. Now I had a traumatized cat, a wounded husband, and a wine buzz. I cleaned the cut, dried the cat with the blow dryer that made her schizoid, then went to bed praying that my husband wouldn’t have a stroke from an internal brain hemorrhage before the morning. Thank God, all survived the night!

The second incidence is even more weird. Derek and I went to a restaurant called ‘Patti’s” with 14 other Loopers. The restaurant looks like it once was a large house with many small rooms connected by hallways. It is famous for it’s 2-inch thick pork chops…and one of it’s bathrooms! Not knowing about the latter beforehand, I opened the bathroom door which triggered a life-sized Indian chief mannequin in full costume, lying in a claw-foot bathtub, to start talking and moving his head and eyes. It was like a Teddy Ruxpin meets Tonto with a little Chuckie thrown in!!!! After the shock wore off, Patti and I couldn’t help but go back in and take some pictures of us having a tete-à-tete with Chief Sitting-in-a-bathtub Bull… in the tub with him. All we lacked were some candles and bubbles!

I’ll end this latest blog with with our excitement yesterday. Derek needed to change out the macerator hose which had the small leak that I had mentioned in an earlier blog. Just to refresh your memory, the macerator grinds up and pumps our waste from the black-water tank to the sea when it’s turned on. Although the valve was closed on the tank (no dumping is allowed on the rivers), as soon as he took one end of the hose off, all of our pee/poop soup came flowing out into our forward bilge!!!! Now mind you, Derek starts gagging if he even has to pick up a small dog turd, so you can imagine how this latest snafu is affecting him. And perhaps you can imagine the smell. We still don’t know why the waste came out with the valve closed, but Derek finished the repair and we flushed out the bilge, but he is NOT gonna mess with it anymore to find out! All is now good down there and we hope to never have to talk about poop again in our future blogs.

Enjoy the pics and please keep us in your prayers. Love y’alls!

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Week 29 & 30: Oct 8 - 22

Week 27 & 28: Sept 23 - Oct 7

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