We woke up while it was completely dark, but were glad that we had decided to anchor in the open ocean, since all we needed to do was pull anchor and point the boat towards Clearwater. We did not need to do any difficult navigation in the dark.
David was not too pleased about waking up early
The water was perfectly flat and remained so throughout our entire voyage across. We watched the sun rise ahead of us and settled in for a long day.
Sunrise over the Gulf
We arrived in our marina Clearwater in the late afternoon, dodging a few crab pots to enter. The marina slip we were assigned looked rather small for our wide beam, and as we tried to pull forward, we found ourselves stuck between the pilings unable to pull all the way in! Luckily the marina had given us another option, so we went to find a spot on their commercial dock next to a dinner cruise yacht. The captain and crew were very friendly and helped us to tie off our lines.
We went for a walk along the beach and the main road and found an interesting tap house for a celebratory drink. We discovered an escape room nearby and decided to do a room before dinner.
Both David and I had a couple of days of busy meetings, so we decided to stay in Clearwater for another few days. These were pretty quiet and we mostly remained on the boat. On our last evening we went out for a great Mexican dinner and did another room at the escape room place.
David had managed to find a boat yard that would haul the boat to perform the engine alignment and replace our destroyed shaft seal to hopefully solve our water problem on the starboard side, so we had a fixed date to get to just north of Sarasota. We spent a few days wandering south down the GICW (Gulf ICW), through residential neighborhoods reminiscent of the Ft. Lauderdale area, anchoring mostly in little bays that were people’s back yards, headed toward the boat yard.
On Thursday, the day before our haulout, we were going to anchor just outside of St. Pete, but the anchorages all looked pretty exposed when we went by them, so we ended up just going all the way to anchoring right outside the boat yard. This boat yard would not allow us to live aboard while the boat was out of the water, so we decided very last minute to buy tickets home to Seattle for the week preceding our planned trip to Big Sky, Montana.
That night, while running the generator to top up our batteries (we were not sure we would be able to be plugged in to power in the boat yard), we ran into an over-heating problem. David checked the strainers and replaced the impeller. When trying to restart the generator, he forgot to re-open the through hull to allow the generator to pull water for cooling…ooops! This resulted in destroying the brand new impeller, which happened to be our only spare!
Apparently no one had cleaned the impeller bits out the last several times it had died
Since most of the marine shops in the area were closed, we decided to wake up early and dingy to shore for a replacement part. When he called the boat yard in the morning, they told us that they could actually haul us out within the hour to a place where we could be plugged in, so we didn’t need to worry about replacing the impeller. This lead to a scramble to finish packing and get the boat ready for us to be away for two weeks!
We managed to get everything together and arrived in the boat yard where they were very particular about being off the boat before it was hauled! They had already lifted us partially out of the water when we all noticed that we had left the upstairs door open and they lowered the boat back in to let David back on to close it!
Highwind hauled again
Though our flights were in the afternoon, we headed to the airport after the boat was hauled, and worked all day from there, since there was nothing else we could do at the yard.
After leaving Mobile, we headed east towards Pensacola and ended up in a beautiful wide open anchorage. We set up in the middle of the anchorage, where the water was around 5 feet under the hull. All three of us were working, with David in his office, me at my desk in the central area, and Nick set up on the upstairs table. We had no problems with all three of us on calls throughout the day. We had a lovely low-key evening and Nick and I played board games while David played D&D online. Nick would be flying out of Pensacola, which wasn’t that far from where we were, so we decided to stay for another night in the anchorage.
On Thursday morning, we pulled anchor and headed to a marina in Pensacola. We knew we were back in Florida when we were accompanied for a while by some dolphins riding in our wake – which was lovely for Nick to see!
A dolphin playing in our wake
After finishing work for the day, we pulled the scooters off the boat and rode into town for a sadly disappointing sushi dinner. There is a running joke with my family now that every time we are in a town marina, we are always separated from the town by a bridge. This means that not only do we have to use the scooters to get to town, but that we have to drive across a bridge in traffic, which is sometimes scary! The joke started way back on the Hudson, where for two marinas in a row, the pedestrian/bike portions of the bridge were closed and we were forced to ride on the highway! Pensacola continued in this tradition for our scooter ride with Nick, but luckily this bridge had a separated bike section :).
As you know, we have been having trouble with our starboard engine for a while now (since Lake Michigan). David has been in communication with many shops, technicians, Yanmar experts etc, and we had been thinking that we may need a replacement of the entire injection assembly. Recently however, David learned that Yanmar just released a new protocol which would allow for replacement of a particular portion of this system, which would be SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than replacing the entire system. We were finally able to get in contact with Yanmar techs in Pensacola who had the necessary computer that would be required for calibration after the replacement AND they would be able to fit us in their schedule.
They arrived in the morning and since David had the day off, he was able to oversee the work. Amazingly they were able to replace the part on both engines and perform the calibration, plus confirm the fix with a quick test voyage all before the early afternoon! They also were able to identify that the starboard engine was not aligned, which is the likely cause of the persistent vibration and poor engine numbers. This has also destroyed our brand new shaft seal which is the likely source of most, if not all, of the water issue on the starboard side. (We believe we’ve had this problem since Virginia, when the techs in Deltaville did not bother to check the engine alignment after we had all the work done on the props). Since the engine numbers were looking better and we know the bilge pumps on that side can keep up with the water coming in from the seal, we decided to keep pressing on and push to find a shop that can deal with the engine alignment somewhere on the east coast of Florida after our gulf “crossing”.
Nick’s flight was on also Friday morning, so we said our goodbyes. We had also heard from some Looper friends just east of us, so with the engine work completed we headed out of Pensacola and to the marina where they were staying. When heading to our dock, we were instructed by the marina to enter on the left side of the covered dock – which we did. However, we quickly discovered that they had given us the directions from the perspective of land – so we had to do a tight circle to head back out to the right side of the dock!
David executed the maneuver perfectly and we got tied up just in time for an amazing sunset view.
Sunset at Two Georges
We met up with our friends for a this-time-not-disapointing sushi dinner. While at dinner we were talking about our plans for making the gulf “crossing”. Loopers typically cross from Carabelle to Clearwater, where at 8knots (the average looper boat speed), it can be made in a ~20 hour all-day-and-overnight stint. Since our planing speed is 15knots, we are able to go much further. We had been somewhat nervous about this leg of the trip, since it requires a full day, plus a weather window, which is hard to plan around work schedules. While our friends needed to stay put another week for some dingy repairs, we looked ahead and the weather for the weekend and discovered there was little to no wind or waves predicted for the crossing. Though we had been planning to continue towards Carabelle and make the crossing there next weekend, we decided instead to cross this weekend!
We needed to fuel up, and had arrived at the marina after their fuel dock was closed, so our plan was to get fuel in the morning and head towards St. Joseph, going outside of the ICW for the day, to anchor for Saturday night. On Sunday we would wake up early and make our crossing.
On Saturday we had a gloriously uneventful outside passage toward St. Joseph. Completely calm seas, warm with a light breeze, and just some light clouds. As we were getting closer to St. Joseph, we realized it was still pretty early in the afternoon – there was plenty of light and if we went a little further, it would cut off time from our long day tomorrow. Since the weather was so calm and no wind was predicted over night, we decided to do something a bit crazy…we’d anchor in open ocean a few miles off shore. This was minimally risky since were not in a high traffic area, the depth was less than 20ft, and we had the holiday lights up on the boat, so we are REALLY visible. We set the alarms for 4:50am and settled in for the night.
Our friend from Seattle, Nick, would be joining us in New Orleans for Thanksgiving and then on Highwind for the rest of the week. After work on Wednesday, David and I drove the rental car into New Orleans and we met up with Nick at the AirBnB. We were in a great location on Royal Street within walking distance from everything in the French Quarter. We had a great dinner catching up.
On Thursday, we walked around the French Quarter and grabbed some late breakfast before heading back to our AirBnB to play a boardgame before our Thanksgiving dinner. Since we had made our plans relatively last minute, most of the nice/famous restaurants were already booked up for Thanksgiving Dinner, but I had managed to get some reservations at a distillery restaurant. Sadly the food was not amazing, but we had brought with us a very nice bottle of wine, and we still had a good time.
Murals in New Orleans
On Friday, we had booked a walking tour of the French Quarter in the morning. We tried to get beignets for breakfast at Cafe de la Monde, however the line was 2 blocks long!! Our tour guide was decent and shared some interesting stories about the multi-cultural background of the area. We walked along the Mississippi, where we would have come on Highwind had we decided to boat all the way down the Mississippi.
Soon after that ended, we had booked a Food Tour of the French Quarter. Since we had not eaten breakfast, we decided to head straight from our walking tour to the restaurant where the food tour would meet and grab a snack and a drink. Our next tour guide was there early, so we had a chance to meet her. The food tour was amazing! We learned about the history of all the food we ate, including Gumbo, Pralines, Muffaletta, Boudin, Red Beans and Rice, and Bread Pudding. I was worried we would only be getting small samples, but we ate a ton and were really full at the end. Completely stuffed, we headed to an escape room for an afternoon of puzzling.
Walking Tour of the French Quarter
After brunch the next morning, we walked through some art galleries on Royal Street. We were headed back to the escape room place to do another of their rooms. Along the way, we had some time to kill, and the line at Cafe Beignet was not as long, so we stopped for a treat. At the escape room place, we discovered that a group of 5 others would be joining us in the room – not ideal. They also didn’t show up on time, but instead of turning them away, the escape room place let them join us 15 minutes into the room. This turned out to be a huge distraction, and we don’t think they had ever done an escape room before (they suggested entering “5555” for one of the locks). With so many people, we required a ton of hints to get through the puzzles, but did make it out with 15 mins to spare.
Mmmmm…Beignets
We had booked another escape room at a different place later in the day, but with some extra time decided to find some live jazz music. It turned out to be harder than we thought, but eventually did find a great group in a tiny bar and listened to them play for a couple of hours.
Jazz in New Orleans
The second escape room place was amazing – one of the best that we’ve been to. You entered through an unmanned room decorated like a 50s detective office where after a few minutes you hear a voice through a Charlie’s Angels speaker on the desk. All of the rooms there are loosely tied together in a narrative of being in a large mansion owned by an eccentric wealthy family. The lobby is decorated like their living room with incredible detail. We had chosen their hardest room where we were warned that the majority of our time would be spent in compete darkness. However, after we solved the first few puzzles and entered the room that was supposed to be dark, we discovered the lights were on! Apparently some other guest had wandered into the room and turned on the lights while trying to find the bathroom. They realized pretty quickly and turned off the lights so that we could finish, and we still enjoyed the experience, but they said we could come back later and do another room to make up for the mistake. Our dinner reservations were not far, so we returned later in the evening.
On Sunday we drove back to Mobile and spent the day doing errands while we had access to a car including picking up some holiday decorations and doing a large grocery run ready for the next week of boating with Nick. Nick has plane tickets out of Pensacola for Friday midday, so we have ~5 more days of cruising and hanging out before he heads back to the west coast.
Our week in Demopolis was largely uneventful, with the brief exception of being denied use of the marina’s courtesy car due to lack of car insurance (we no longer own any cars!), until the last night, when I decided, at 11:30 pm after my shower to clean out the shower’s bilge box. Unfortunately, during the process, we discovered that the hose to the through-hull had turned into a siphon and promptly began ejecting water into the bedroom storage room. We realized that the through-hull for our shower and bedroom sink are placed so low on the boat, that when we are in fresh water and with the boat live-aboard-heavy, they are actually below the water line.
Thus ensued a 45 minute saga involving me holding the end of the tube above David’s head while he did some creative problem solving with the also apparently broken pump. We finally managed to get a solution in place that stopped the siphon, but with the issues on the pump and the knowledge that the through-hull was still underwater, we decided to stop using the shower, at least until we returned to salt water.
David working on the shower bilge
Since we’ve been having problems with lots of water in the starboard engine bay, that night David had also coincidentally been working on the bilge system. Unfortunately we discovered during our shower project disaster that the float switch for the bilge system had come free from the hull and was therefore failing to cause the regular bilges to run. In addition, the new dry bilge system David had been installing that night also seemed to be non-functional as well, which David later discovered was due to having installed the pump too high on the wall. We were finally able to drain enough of the water to discover what appears to be a small leak in the spot where the bulkhead in front of the diesel tanks is fiberglassed to the hull. When fixed, the dry bilge system is able to keep up with this leak, so we’re not going to sink, but obviously something we need to further troubleshoot ASAP!
We left Demopolis on Saturday with a small flotilla of boats just before dawn headed for the first lock. Being the fastest of the bunch, we headed first out of the lock. As I mentioned in the last blog post, there’s not much in the way of marinas or anchorages between Demopolis and Mobile, so our plan was to try to blast our way down to Mobile in the two weekend days, assuming smooth passage through the remaining locks.
Leaving Demopolis at Dawn
This last section of the Tombigbee River was incredibly annoying as the distance we needed to travel was essentially double the miles as the crow flies.
We pulled into the Three Rivers anchorage via a narrow and tree branch framed entrance and set up on the hook for the night.
Entrance to Three Rivers
Our last day down the river was very uneventful and put us through our last lock on the inland river system with no trouble. Since entering the Erie Canal at Waterford we have travelled through 95 locks! 29 on the Erie and Oswego canals, 44 on the Trent-Severn in Canada and 22 on the inland waterways from Chicago to Mobile.
Highwind on the wall in Mobile
Due to our easy passage on the last two days, we ended up arriving in Mobile several days before our reservations started at Turner Marine. Unfortunately all marinas in the area were fully booked due to it being Thanksgiving week, and Turner Marine was not open on Sundays. We were able to grab a spot on the not-quite-free wall in the heart of Mobile for the night and we hoped Turner would be able to squeeze us in the next morning.
With plenty of the day left, we decided to do a bit of tourism in Mobile, starting with a visit to the USS Alabama. The museum was incredibly good, with almost all areas of the ship open for exploration. We also walked through the submarine USS Drum. It was our first taste of the warm southern weather, which was very welcome after the last month of cold nights and frosty mornings.
USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park
After the battleship, we went into town for an escape room, and with a little time to kill before our appointment, we found a beignet shop and had a treat.
The next morning we spoke with Turner Marine who found space for us to come in early, so we headed through the final portion of the Tombigbee River and entered into Mobile Bay. We were now situated and ready for the Thanksgiving weekend, where we planned to rent a car and drive to New Orleans for the long weekend.
While in the car on the way to Nashville, Dad had managed to make us reservations at Etch. It was late when we arrived, so after putting our stuff in the AirBnB, we immidiately hopped in a Lyft and headed downtown. The dinner was absolutely delicious! After dinner, we walked through Broadway, which is the main party street in Nashville. It was incredible. There were live bands (sometimes multiple!) in every bar and huge lines of people (no masks) outside to get in. The cacophony on the street was unbelievable. Party busses, party tractors, and party barges were driving around filled with people dancing. Also, since it was Halloween weekend, people were wearing costumes too! We did not stop anywhere here – our plan was to catch some more relaxed, sit-down-while-you-listen music on Saturday.
Broadway in Nashville
On Saturday morning, we ate a huge and delicious breakfast at Tenn before taking a sight-seeing tour of the city on a golf cart. We saw quite a bit of the city and learned that the main things to do here are eat, drink, and enjoy music! We drove through Centennial park and our driver explained out the different areas of the park symbolize East, Middle, and West Tennessee. Our driver recommended that we go to Printer’s Alley to check out some music.
Golf Cart Tour of Nashville
After the tour, we headed to Printer’s Alley and went into Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie where we caught the end of one show and most of the next. It was early afternoon, so the venue was reasonably empty. The music was excellent and the bands were really fun.
Printer’s Alley and Music
We stayed until it started getting packed as evening crept in and then headed off to find some dinner. We hadn’t made any reservations anywhere, so we picked a random eatery that still had space and had a mediocre dinner of tacos with Hot Chicken and other meats. After dinner, we found a whiskey bar called Gertie’s and enjoyed some fantastic cocktails.
Cocktails at Gertie’s
On Sunday, Dad had arranged a Whiskey Tasting Tour. We were picked up at our AirBnB, and then taken to Nelson’s Green Briar first. We learned about the history of this distillery – that started before the prohibition, grew to be one of the largest distributors of Whiskey in the nation before completely shutting down during prohibition. Several years ago, through some amazing luck, the great-great grandsons of the founders discovered this piece of family history including the original recipes and decided to resurrect the business.
This distillery was in a revitalized industrial block called Marathon, named after the primary original occupants, Marathon Motor Works. They were a small volume custom car company in the early 1900s, and there was a small museum for its glory years. The rest of the museum had wine and whiskey tasting rooms, where we ended up buying some port and whiskey from the locals.
Marathon Motor Works museum — they’d found a few of the original vehicles and restored them!
Throughout the day actually we learned a lot about the impact of prohibition on the Tennessee Whiskey business (it killed it for generations). Most of the distilleries are quite young and it was only recently that distillers other than Jack Daniels were even allowed to begin in Tennessee! We also visited H Clark which was started by the lawyer who helped pass laws allowing Whiskey to be distilled and sold in counties other than the one where Jack Daniels is located. Our last stop was Leiper’s Fork. Throughout the trip, we drove through the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee and got to see some absolutely beautiful fall foliage also.
The tour took most of the day and we decided to have our driver drop us off at a place for barbecue for dinner. Although David and I had planned to spend one more night in Nashville, we decided that it made more sense to drive home on Sunday evening so that we would be back on the boat for Monday, so after dinner we headed back to the AirBnB to pack and say goodbye. We had a great week on the boat cruising the Mississippi and Ohio rivers with Mum and Dad, plus a fantastic weekend in Nashville to cap it all off!
We needed to make good time with Mum and Dad aboard as our plan was to get to Nashville for the weekend where they would fly out early next week. This meant we had some 200 miles to go on the Mississippi River before we would then turn upstream into the Ohio River and travel upstream against the current until we could join the Tennessee River. Our first leg from Alton would include two locks. The locks on the inland rivers are primarily for commercial traffic, and give precedence to the HUGE barges that travel up and down the rivers each day. Some of the barges are so big that they have to be separated and sent up/down in pieces before being re-connected at the top/bottom. This means that as pleasure craft boats, we may get extremely lucky and sail right through the lock, or we may end up stuck waiting for 3 or more hours before a gap where pleasure cruisers are let through. We woke up before dawn to call the lock and find out the situation. He told us he was just finishing up bringing up a barge, so we quickly untied and started making our way to the lock (1nm from the marina). We had a short wait for some accompanying loopers in the Marina to join us and then we were on our way.
Locking at Dawn
The next lock is apparently the busiest lock in the entire United States at Chain of Rocks. As you are cruising along the river, you come to a fork, and there is a gigantic arrow pointing you towards the left. Jeremy made sure to warn us to turn left! If you do not go left, you end up in rapids that are so dangerous, a sailboat who missed those directions about a week ago got stuck on the rocks, and after two failed extraction missions eventually sunk.
There were a couple of barges in the queue at the locks, so we dropped anchor to wait our turn. The current was extremely weird here and we had to re-set our anchor multiple times. We eventually got through, and then after a little bit longer, we cruised past down town St. Louis. We went outside for a quick selfie, and David tried to fly the drone to get a shot of the boat with the arch, but unfortunately there was an issue with its calibration and it tried to fly itself into the water, so we gave up on that!
St. Louis Arch
We pulled in to Hoppies, which is a well known marina and the only place to stay for a long stretch of the Mississippi. It is a collection of 3 barges tied together that you tie up to. David and I set up for working and Mum and Dad headed into the nearby village to do some exploring. Since I had a short gap in my schedule, I joined Mum and Dad for a quick afternoon dessert break!
Sights around Hoppies
The next morning, we again woke up at dawn with the aim to get as far as we could before David and I needed to get working. However, Mum and Dad volunteered to keep driving the boat while we worked. It’s very useful to have boat-owners as crew!! We arrived at the next safe anchor spot right around sunset and dropped the hook. It was a pretty narrow spot and we were the only boat there.
Cruising at Dawn; A Tight Anchorage
The next day, we again had an early wake up, and a long cruise completed by Mum and Dad and we arrived in the late afternoon at Paducah on Thursday. When we arrived at the dock, we were greeted with the most amazing complete rainbow across the river.
Amazing Rainbow at Paducah
We decided that we would not be able to make it by boat any closer to Nashville so instead we would extend our stay through the weekend and rent a car to drive to Nashville. On Friday, Mum and Dad explored Paducah – they visited the National Quilt Museum, which sounded amazing, and the wall of murals that depict the town’s history. David and I spent the day working on the boat :). After I was finished working, I went to pick up the rental car and we planned to head out after David’s afternoon meetings were complete. We were all very excited as none of us had visited Nashville before!
One of the reasons we wanted to stop in Alton was because loopers get a discount for staying 5+ days in the marina. David’s company was sending him to Prague to meet and work with the team there, so we needed somewhere to park the boat for ~9 days, and I decided to tag along on the trip instead of hanging out in Alton. Having worked on with several different teams in Prague, David has actually visited the city quite a bit, but this would be only my second time (the last time also tagging along on a work trip!).
We landed late on Saturday and after checking into the hotel, we learned that is difficult to find food in the city late at night! After being turned away about about 7 different places (kitchen is closed!), we managed to find a restaurant, Divinis that hesitatingly agreed to seat us, but we could only order one course! We had an inkling that we’d stumbled upon a fancy restaurant when we saw that there was a tasting menu option. Ooops, we were still in our worn-for-24-hours airplane clothes! Both our meals were absolutely delicious, and we learned later after talking to some of David’s colleagues that the restaurant is Michelin rated.
On Sunday, we passed by the astronomical clock in Old Town Square, which on our last visit was covered by scaffolding, but now was visible. We were headed for the Klementinum for a tour of the astronomical tower (not to be confused by the astronomical clock) and an amazingly beautiful library, which we couldn’t actually go into. At the top of the tower was a great view of the city.
Next, we climbed the gothic tower at the beginning of Charles Bridge – something David had wanted to do, but never had a chance to on his previous trips. At the base of the tower was an exhibit of items from various time periods that had been fished out of the river around the bridge, and a video of the myths surrounding the building of the bridge. There was another great view of the city from the top. We met up with some of David’s colleagues for a lovely lunch, and then to pass the time in the afternoon (so we didn’t fall asleep from jet lag), we decided to do a boat trip on the river.
Starting on Monday, David had full days in the office and then work dinners in the evenings scheduled for the rest of the week. This meant that I was on my own.
I started out the week with a free guided tour of the Old Town, New Town and Jewish Quarter. My guide, Sarah, was an American with Czech family who had been living in Prague for 10 years. She was a fantastic story teller and I learned a lot about the city throughout various different periods from the early 1400s to the Velvet Revolution. In the afternoon, I re-traced the steps of the tour, and walked further up Wenceslas Square towards the National Museum while snacking on a Trdelnik, which you can find all over Prague, but actually originates from Belgium. Nonetheless delicious! In the evening, I had a lovely pasta dinner with a glass of wine and a good book.
The next morning, I spent in the Jewish Quarter, walking through all the museums. There are about 7 historically preserved parts of this neighborhood, and for me the most incredible/intense/thought-provoking is the Pinkas Synagogue, where almost every inch of the wall space is filled with names of Czech victims of the Holocaust. I was visiting this museum about a day after reading about the Texas law requiring schools to teach multiple sides of every subject, including the Holocaust. On the previous day’s tour, I had also learned about the Old Jewish Cemetery. Unlike in Christian tradition, it is apparently not tradition to have graveyards close to places of worship. Due to the fact that the Jews were restricted to the small area of the Jewish Quarter, the cemetery’s proximity to several surrounding synagogues is actually not by intention. In addition, when the land was full, they were denied new land for a new cemetery, so they had to keep building up. I believe there are something like 12 layers before the last person was buried in the cemetery, so it sits much higher than street level (which has already been raised over the years due to flooding). The cemetery packed with tombstones (each was removed and replaced after the new layer of dirt was added). I did not take many photos, wanting to respect the places that I was visiting.
In the evening, I attended a classical music concert (getting an extremely good deal on last-minute VIP tickets) that was in one of the churches of the Klementinum, which had a 6 piece string orchestra, a soprano, and sometimes the organ as well. It was a digest of well-known classical pieces including some Mozart, Dvorak, and Vivaldi, but the acoustics were amazing and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Over the next few days, I explored more of the City including walking over the Charles Bridge, visiting the Museum of Communism, and the Mucha Museum.
On Saturday, David and I were finally able to spend the day together, so we had arranged a private tour with my guide from Monday. We met her at a farmer’s market on the river and walked through Old Town, New Town, over the river and up to Letna Park, and through the Prague Castle. In New Town, we learned about Operation Anthropoid, a mission carried out by Czech paratroopers with the goal of assassinating Reinhart Heidrich, Hitler’s #2. The story is fascinating and there is a memorial at Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius to the paratroopers, all of whom lost their lives in the mission. Around the city there are also memorials on various houses where former residents hid the paratroopers as part of the mission (I saw some on my Monday tour). We also stopped at the public library that has an amazing chimney of books in the lobby. Apparently this was known only to locals until a year or so ago when some pictures of it went viral on instagram and now it is always busy with tourists!
In the Prague Castle, we learned about the history of the cathedral that was actually only completed in recent times. Inside we saw the amazing stained glass windows, where you can see that they were funded by such modern institutions as a bank and an insurance agency. The latter in particular is hilarious as it depicts various natural disasters like storms and flooding.
We finished off our trip with a return to Divinis to sample their full menu – again delicious. After another long day of travel, we arrived back to the boat in Alton along with my parents who flew in from Seattle to join us for a week on the inland rivers.
View of the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers
Our plan on leaving the Harborside Marina was to do the next night on anchor, but on a whim we decided to follow the couple we’d been cruising with to the Heritage Harbor marina. It turned out to be a fortuitous decision as one of the marina staff – Jeremy – would be giving a presentation for Loopers about the next section of the cruise – down the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. After wrapping up work, we headed over for the presentation where about 20 other loopers were already gathered! The presentation was extremely informational and apparently Jeremy gives one essentially every night during the season at which loopers are passing through this part of the journey, customizing the talk based on current weather/river conditions and local knowledge from his contacts downstream.
The next morning, we set off for one of the anchorages recommended by Jeremy. As I get off a work call, I go upstairs to see David starting to turn the boat around the south side of an island to head in to the anchoring spot. Remembering something Jeremy said, I checked my notes – yes, we were supposed to drive past the second red buoy and then turn around up the river. David was turning before the second buoy! I politely told him perhaps we should go further, but he said that he’d remembered Jeremy saying it would be safe 200ft south of the island and we were 500+ft past the island, and the chart showed it to be clear. In the next 30 seconds, the depth alarm sounded, David tried to quickly throw the boat in reverse, but no, we were completely stuck on a sand bar. Ooops. We tried a few times to put the boat in full reverse, but we just weren’t moving.
We called BoatUS to request a rescue. David had an idea to try doing some weight re-distribution on the boat, so we opened all the taps on the boat and basically emptied the fresh water tank. We pumped all the diesel from the up river tank into the down river tank. We dropped the dingy into the water (so it’s weight was not on the swimstep) and moved all the heavy equipment in the front lazarettes into the dingy. We tried reversing again, but no dice – we were still stuck. Then, David saw on AIS a tug boat coming up river towards us. He asked over the radio if they could come close to us and wake us – hoping that the rocking of the boat would help loosen us enough to back off the sand bar. The tug pulled right up to us, and as he was passing, revved his engines. The water swell was just enough for us to get free! What a fun 2 hour adventure. 10 minutes later, we were set up on anchor in a lovely spot on the river.
Beautiful evening and sunrise on the Illinois River
At this point, we had almost no fresh water — maybe 4 gallons or so — and it was either go back upriver ~15 miles to grab water from the nearest marina, or continue ~200 miles to the next source of water. We decided that showers are overrated and to just bomb south as fast as possible. So, we woke up Saturday and made 115nm on the river in one day, pulling into an awkward anchorage just on the side of the channel, just upriver from a bridge, right before sundown.
On Sunday we woke up early for the next leg to Grafton. Knowing that we would only have the one weekend day, we decided to arrive early, so that we could enjoy some activities in Grafton.
This flag marks the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers and is the largest American flag on the Mississippi River
First up, we stopped in the Marina Office that was also a wine tasting room. Unfortunately the wine here was not good. Next, we rode a ski lift to a winery at the top of a hill. While very fun, the chairlift was extremely slow! However, at the top, we had a fantastic view of the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi River that was surprisingly gorgeous. We had lunch and sampled some of the wine from the winery, which also wasn’t good.
Rather than riding down the chairlift, we chose to walk down the hill, since it would be much faster. David managed to secure us a reservation for a zipline adventure. We had a great time zipping through the hillside, with occasional views of the river!
Ziplining in Grafton
We rounded at the day with a final wine tasting (another really bad set of wines) and then headed back to the boat for dinner. Looking ahead, we only had one more cruise to Alton, where we would leave the boat for 10 days while we flew to Prague for a work trip for David. We decided to spend a few days in Grafton and head to Alton later in the week. One of David’s friends from autocross was solo road tripping around the east coast for vacation and met up with us to hang out and spend the night.
On Thursday, we made the short hop down to Alton. For our first night there, the night before we flew out, we headed to a local brewery, where I found wall decor that accurately summarized our personalities, and had a decent meal with good beer.
Old Bakery Brewery in Alton
David even got to do a “beer pairing” with Halloween candy.
As we left Grand Haven, we quickly determined that the keyway issue with the prop was not, in fact, the cause of the vibration we were getting. We had suspected this, but were hoping against hope that this obvious running gear problem would have some effect on our situation. It really didn’t. But at least we had all the leaking through hulls replaced.
We tried to contact all of the Yanmar shops within hundreds of miles, again, with our new information that we really needed someone to plug in the Yanmar computer and verify that our problem was, indeed, the injection pump. At this time, the best quote we had for the injection pump was around 12,100$, and it also still required finding a Yanmar tech with the old computer to “link” it with the engine computer. So, even if we did just blindly pray and buy the part, we still needed to find a tech, which we had so far been completely unable to do. After hours on the phone and lots of messages, phone tag, and callbacks, we exhaustively demonstrated that virtually no one actually had that Yanmar computer, and of the couple shops that did, neither was willing to look at us until November 15th, which would have meant committing to getting the boat hauled for the winter and winterized, living in Chicago for the winter. So, after much frustration, and more calling Yanmar folks around the country, we decided that our best bet is likely to just head south to the gulf, limp along, and hope we make it down to the land of actual Yanmar service centers.
We’d spent a full week in Grand Haven, due to the horrible weather, and no other loopers had moved an inch in that week either. But it meant that we were starting on a Tuesday morning, with ~150 miles to go to Chicago. We did some guesstimates on likely morning hops and decided that we should be able to get to Chicago on Friday morning. We finally remembered that we can use our Seattle Yacht Club membership for reciprocal moorage, and made a reservation at the Chicago Yacht Club for a few days.
We headed south to St. Joseph, which actually had a perfectly adequate free wall to tie up to, just inside the breakwater to the lake, though it had no power. While maneuvering for final approach to the wall, something weird happened where it felt like the starboard motor didn’t shift into forward and we ended up lightly bumping the swim platform into a notch on the wall. It appeared to just be a small scratch, but it didn’t fill me with confidence. It seemed to shift fine after that, so I didn’t know what to think. We ended up getting way too much ice cream at a local shop here, and got a pile of pizza for takeout and a couple meals of leftovers.
The next morning, we headed down to Michigan City. Pulling out, the shifter didn’t work one time of a few attempts, so we verified it had started being flaky. We’d been looking at diesel prices for a while, and saw that this was our cheapest diesel for quite a while, so we planned to fill up. When we arrived, we pulled into the diesel dock and … didn’t fit. It was probably about 17 feet wide between the finger pier and the piling. Also, as I was pulling in to check width, the starboard motor wouldn’t go into forward again, and the dock area was very tight. So we just stayed wedged into the piling, just close enough to get the diesel hose to both of our fill spots. Hannah filled up the tanks while I went down and cleaned up the contacts on the shift solenoids, which then let us actually shift reliably again. Then, going from the diesel dock into our assigned slip, the port motor wouldn’t go into reverse at a crucial moment, and we lightly tagged the pier there too, with no damage. So, then I got to take apart the port shift solenoids and clean them. Kind of freaky that both sides independently started being flaky 24 hours apart from each other, but it’s definitely time to replace those.
Michigan City was otherwise uneventful. The next morning, we took an early leg to get the rest of the way to the Chicago Yacht Club. This was a fabulous location – the night skyline photo at the header of this post is taken from our dock! We arrived in the middle of the week, so had a few hard days of work, but we did manage to make same-day reservations at Porto, a Portuguese and Spanish restaurant. We sat at the chef’s table and got to watch our meal prepared and chat with the chef. Dinner was so delicious, you basically had to roll us out!
Our traditional Michelin star restaurant sign selfie
We met up with Dan and Alana for dinner at the yacht club on Friday night. We also have a friend who is a recent graduate of the Chicago Institute of Art, Amay, so we met up with and we met up with to see the museum. In particular, he wanted to see the Barbara Kruger special exhibit. It was not a very subtle exhibit.
I was sad to have walked by and missed all the historical sections of the museum, but I did get to see American Gothic on the way and then we spend some time in the modern wing where we saw Rothkos and Pollocks, which I know mum and Auntie Helen would have appreciated, but were probably wasted on David and I. We’ll have to come back again so that I can see the impressionists :).
View from the top of the Art Institute
The weather at the beginning of the week was looking pretty bad, and both David and I had extremely busy mornings scheduled, meaning it would be very hard to make it for the next stretch which would be at least 50 miles, since we did not want to stay on the free wall at Joliet, where Loopers for several days in a row had been reporting that locals were coming by and cutting their lines in the middle of the night.
On our last night in Chicago, we walked home from dinner through the park by the marina, which turned out to be the location of the famous Bean! It was actually quite moving (for me) to see the sky scrapers reflected in its surface, with the greenery of the park behind us.
The Chicago Bean
The next morning, we woke up extremely early, along with our neigbours from the Yacht Club with whom we coordinated for this leg of the trip. We had no trouble going through the main lock, and then enjoyed a great morning cruising through downtown Chicago. We apparently made it on the news as the weather live-cam cut right to the moment that we were entering the city!
We passed the Joliet wall and noticed with irony that directly across the river from the free+crime wall is a police station!
While we had originally planned to anchor, we decided in the last minute to pull into a Harborside Marina along with our companions from Chicago, and another Looper boat that we met in the lock. We all met up in the bar for dinner that night. Now that we are safely in the Illinois River, we can breathe easy about not getting stuck on the frozen Lake Michigan for the winter.
On our last night in Sault Ste Marie, after we returned to the boat for dinner, we walked through a group of Canadians having drinks on the dock who invited us to join them. They confirmed that there was a US border crossing checkpoint in the marina just across the river on the American side of Sault Ste Marie. In the morning, we cast off our lines, and immediately submitted our info via the border crossing app. It was about 15 minutes to get across the river and we were allowed to pull up to their fuel dock while we awaited our confirmation. After another 30 minutes of watching the app remain in “pending” status, I decided to give them a call. As it turns out, there had been so few people submitting border crossings via the app that they just hadn’t been monitoring it! In about 30 seconds, our info was processed and we were good to go. David dealt with filling up with diesel, water, and emptying our holding tanks while I hopped on the scooter and headed to a pharmacy where I would be able to fill a prescription for some tennis elbow meds that I had been waiting all through Canada to pick up.
After we were all provisioned up, we started heading south with De Tour being our potential stopping point. Shortly into the journey, David started noticing a large increase in the fuel consumption on our starboard motor. This one has always had slightly higher numbers, but these were significantly higher than normal. We also started feeling a slight vibration on that side at a certain RPM. We backed off on that engine and I started calling around to find local divers in the De Tour area, since our going assumption was that maybe we had something snagged around that prop. Unfortunately, the most local diver that I could get on the phone (on a weekend, of course) was in Mackinaw City. Since we were going a lot slower at this point, we didn’t think we would be able to make it safely to Mackinaw before it got dark, especially given that some winds were expected in northern Lake Michigan. After a bit of debate, we decided to head to Mackinac Island, which is a little bit north of Mackinaw – where we would avoid rough water and arrive just before dark. In theory we would be able to find either a diver or a boat yard in Mackinaw the next day, although this was somewhat in question due to it being Labor Day weekend.
Mackinac Island Airport Shuttle
We pulled into the Mackinac Island in the early evening, taking the last big-boat slip in the marina! Along the way, we had read up on the Grand Hotel dining experience and decided to get fancy (coat and tie required!) and head up for dinner. On Mackinac Island, there are no motorized vehicles allowed of any sort, including ebikes and electric scooters (although we later learned that after the season closes, locals use snowmobiles to get around in the winter!!), so everything is either bicycles or horse and carriage. I wanted to ride in a carriage to dinner, but we did not realize you needed to book this in advance, so we ended up walking. Luckily I had just bought some new fancy shoes that are actually comfortable to walk in!
Grand Hotel dinner on Mackinac
I really wanted David to call me Alicia and I would call him Juliooooooooooooo, but he didn’t really want to comply. (Please, go and watch “Grand Hotel” [Ed note: don’t]). Dinner at the Grand Hotel is an EVENT. They have three different menus that they rotate each night throughout the season. You are directed into an ENORMOUS dining room and you have several different servers throughout the dinner. Our service was a little bit lack-luster, with our drinks server not seeming to care at all what we ordered. We were told there was a full bar, and when David tried to order a rum negroni, we discovered the only rum they had was Bacardi :). The food was delicious though, and it was quite a fun evening.
Another Looper couple we had met in Canada was also in the marina, and after chatting with them for a while, and looking at the weather forecast, which was going to be extremely windy for the next few days, we decided that we would stay at Mackinac and actually experience the island, rather than leaving early the next morning. We figured we would be more likely to find either a Yanmar service shop and/or a diver after Labor Day. So, the next morning, we headed up the hill to the fort that overlooked the marina. The fort/museum was actually very well done with lots of interesting exhibits.
Amazing views from the fort on Mackinac
We spent the rest of the day walking to all the major tourist spots on the island including a second fort on the highest point of the island, and a naturally forming archway. We also stopped in at the one brewery on the island, which actually doesn’t brew anything on the island. They also turned out to be a distillery, none of which was made on the island either.
Mackinac Island arch
At this point, the weather forecast started to look really bad with 40+kt winds predicted, and we knew we actually wouldn’t be leaving the island for another couple of days. We settled in for a couple of days of working on Mackinac. The next day, the winds were blowing so hard that one of our dock lines actually snapped (during one of my meetings!!). I felt the tug on the boat and yelled for David. We were able to replace the lines and luckily the marina had basically emptied out that morning so we no longer had a neighbour to swing in to. The next two days were also predicted for bad winds, so we ended up on Mackinac for some time!
We decided to head out with the weather window, and aim south, hoping that we’d eventually find someone who could come out and take a look at the engine. Not too long into this journey, we suddenly had the port engine overheat. Back in Canada, David had noticed that one of the belts on this engine was looking pretty worn. As it turns out there are no after-market replacements, and nobody anywhere in Canada had it in stock. David had ordered 6 Yanmar spares to our package holding service in Virgina, and we just needed to get to a place where we’d be able to send a package. The engine had overheated because this belt had snapped and had also dislodged the second belt. David was able to return the first belt to its place and we figured we could keep going on one belt and we’d overnight the belt package to wherever we ended up. However, only a few minutes later the engine reheated again, and this time the other belt had also snapped. This meant we were down to one engine – the problematic one. Meanwhile, I had found a diver in Charlevoix that would be able to come out and see if he could identify or rule out anything wrong with the propeller as the cause of the vibration. We decided we would limp in to Charlevoix on the one engine. David placed the overnight order to our package service to have everything delivered to us the next day. Luckily our friends from Mackinac were also at Charlevoix, and though we pulled in just after sunset when the marina was closed, they came to catch our lines. Our big fat cat is not very maneuverable at low speeds for docking on only one engine!!
The next morning, the diver arrived and discovered that the starboard prop was actually loose with the key that keeps the prop in place having shifted. This meant that until our package arrived with the new belts for the port engine, we were dead in the water, not wanting to put further stress on the starboard prop until we have a chance to get hauled and have everything inspected and fixed.
Unfortunately, that night disaster struck at our package center and they were not able to get the packages out. Thus ensued a 5 day struggle with the service and their lies and delays, calling every few hours to offer them money, beg, plead, anything we could do, to get the package out the door.
By Friday, with the packages still not sent yet, we knew nothing would be arriving over the weekend, and we were resigned to spending the entire weekend and more in Charlevoix. David got a haircut on Saturday and learned from the hairdresser about a local point of interest – the “mushroom houses”. These turned out to be a small street with houses that looked like they came from a fairytale!
Hanging out at Charlevoix
We decided for Sunday to take the ferry to nearby Beaver Island to explore. This necessitated staying one night on the island, due to the off-season limited ferry schedule. In the morning, we hopped on the ferry with an overnight bag and our scooters. Our plan for the day would be to scooter around the island and end up at the brewery in town (they do brew on the island!).
About 15 minutes into our scooter ride out of the main street on the northern point of the island, the paved road quickly turned unpaved and was very uncomfortable! We decided to press on, since there wasn’t that much else to do in the town. We did almost the full loop around the island and saw the main attractions including the southern lighthouse, which is in the process of being restored, “the big birch” and “the big rock”. Yes, a big rock is the main attraction :).
Beaver Island attractions
By the time we arrived at the brewery, 37 miles of scootering later, I was ready to sit down, after being shaken up on gravel roads for the entire day. Amazingly we didn’t puncture the tires on either of our scooters! The brewmaster also turned out to be the island’s chief librarian and we had a great chat with him. Apparently it is a local activity to get large groups of people together on the Big Rock for a photo. Sometimes after slowly cruising around the island with a picnic table in the back of a truck!
For dinner, we headed to the Beaver Island Lodge for a nice meal. They weren’t quite ready to seat us when we arrived, so we sat at the bar and chatted with our neighbour who turned out to be the proprietor of the new Bodega in town and recommended that we stop there for breakfast in the morning before getting on the ferry. Dinner was lovely and accompanied by a beautiful sunset. The next morning we woke up early to hop on the ferry back to Charlevoix before the Monday work day started.
Late Monday night, we finally got a notice from USPS that our packages were actually being processed, with an estimated delivery date of Thursday (over a week after we put in our overnight delivery order…) At this point we were resigned to our fate with nothing to do but wait in Charlevoix until the packages arrived. As it turned out, they did arrive on Wednesday (while still showing an estimated delivery of Thursday…), but we had one other package on the way (a warranty-replacement solar charge controller to replace our flaky one) that would not arrive until Thursday morning. Wednesday night, David got the new belts on the port engine, and after some basic testing, we declared the engine ready to go as soon as Fedex arrived in the morning to head south to find repairs for the other engine.
You must be logged in to post a comment.