We’re at Marina Cove Marina, which is near nuthin’, Alabama. Just ain’t nuthin’ here except the really small marina (that picture is the whole marina and the other is the “marina office”. No cell phone service anywhere all day on the water and none here. Oh well, it’s only $34 to stay overnight.

However, you can go see the Bevill lock, a fake southern mansion museum, and a restored steam powered sternwheeler riverboat by walking up the road a mile or two, which we did. We did not see one car on the road the whole time. It’s kind of fun strolling along the yellow stripes in the middle of the road.

The faux mansion is just an honorarium for Tom Bevill, a US congressman whom got the money for the lock, the museum (which displays his trophies and a few random other things about the Ten-Tom) plus the decommissioned and restored sternwheeler stump and snag puller boat The Montgomery. The Montgomery was really worth seeing. It was totally restored (your US tax dollars at work!) and open so you could walk through it and see the two huge steam boilers (84 tons each) and all of the machinery necessary to run the boat. John S. would have loved it. It also had the original working steam whistle, which you can blow by stepping on the whistle pedal in the pilot house. Kathy didn’t do that, but you can bet I did. WOW! I wish I had one of those on Nonchalance!

We drove to Oxford, MS today….a very pretty and quaint almost touristy type of town, but without the T-shirt stores or fudge shops. It had a real town square with a huge old courthouse and city hall. Nice little shops, the oldest department store in the south (est. 1838) and even a culinary and kitchen gadget specialty store (Kathy’s favorite type of store). We just walked all around the square and poked into the various stores. We got Habanero fudge sauce (yep…chili and chocolate), pear vinegar, cabernet vinegar and an absolutely huge cinnamon roll with lots of white icing, which I’ll warm up for breakfast tomorrow . Yumm……

Oxford, MS is also the location of Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home. Faulkner (Pulitzer Prize winning author, i.e. The Sound and the Fury) lived most of his adult life in Oxford. His home is almost exactly as he left it, including furnishings, pictures on the wall, his typewriter, boots, etc. Very interesting. In the room where he frequently wrote, the initial outline, by day, of his book The Fable is written on the wall in Faulkner’s own hand, left there when he finished and moved on. See pic.

Tomorrow’s our last day on Columbus because the 2 closed locks are finally supposed to reopen.

We visited Waverly Mansion here in Columbus, MS. It’s an antebellum southern plantation on 40 acres of what used to be a 6,000 acre plantation growing cotton and corn and supplying sawed lumber to the area. It was built by Colonel James Young in 1853. He oversaw the signing of the treaty with the indians which opened this whole area to the US. He was granted land purchase rights and bought 40,000 acres of land. He sold off 34,000 and kept 6,000 acres for his plantation on the Tombigbee river. He built the mansion and many other buildings, forming a small town of his own in the area of his plantation.

The antebellum mansion is really interesting. It has a huge (40’ X 40’) central hall with a four story open space with walkways and hand carved mahogany railings and hand turned mahogany spindles around each of the 3 successively smaller walkways on the higher floors, the fourth being a large cupola for viewing the landscape of the plantation. It also has incredible plaster frieze work of acanthus leaves in every ceiling medallion, fancy ceiling cornices and the original gasiliers (gas chandeliers, now electrified) that operated from a methane production shed outside the house.

The antebellum homes here were not destroyed in the Civil War because of the rivers and swamps that kept Sherman’s army from reaching them and completing their assigned mission of destroying all towns and plantations in Mississippi and other states. The Union Army just simply couldn’t get here.

This mansion was occupied by the Young’s family until about 1900. It fell into disuse and then disrepair until in the late 1950’s when it was completely overgrown by the forest, taken over by possums, bats, and the occasional hunters, who set up burn barrels in the center of the great hall to stay warm. It was also the site of many local fraternity and sorority parties in the 1950s. Then, in 1961, it was purchased by the current owner, Mr. Snow. He is a local antique dealer, not particularly wealthy, and he and his wife spent 40 years restoring the mansion to its current state, which is very nice. The guide explained how the couple had to spend a whole year picking mud dauber wasp nests out of the plaster friezes with toothpicks and toothbrushes so as not to damage the original plaster work. Mr. Snow, now 81, still lives there and continues to work on the house. The exterior, which was probably done first, needs it again, but the interior is really beautiful. He also filled it with period antiques which were fairly inexpensive in the 1960s and 70s, so you get a chance to see what it would have looked like before the Civil War.

The grounds had massive, 250 year old magnolia trees (one is the largest magnolia in the state) and boxwood bushes descended from the original boxwood bush lined garden walks of Colonel Young.

Today, I bought Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, a book on the Civil War, recommended by an anonymous comment on my blog entry about our visit to Shiloh. The small bookstore in town had a whole large section on the Civil War and the young clerk at the store knew the author’s name as soon as I mentioned the title. You gott’a know we’re down South. Even Kathy, a good Southern girl, said “Huh?” when I first mentioned the book. I guess Texas isn’t as “into” the Civil War as is Mississippi.

SO we’re not going to Demopolis for a while after all! We are in Columbus, MS and we found out when we got here that everybody else had the same idea as us about staying in Demopolis, plus a lot of boaters insurance will not let them get to salt water before late November, so they're rafting them 4 deep at Demopolis. "Rafting" is when they tie boats to the dock and then tie more boats up to the sides of those boats. Luckily, we got a very nice 70 ft. slip at a good price with electric, water, internet, etc. and got an Enterprise rental car for a week. In addition, the friends we were cruising with before (the Loose Stones) said they really liked Columbus, so this may be much better than Demopolis and we’ll still be on our Cruise Plan after we pass Demopolis and Coffeeville, arriving at Mobile sometime around Nov. 25th. As an eerie coincidence, here we are in Columbus and a full scale operating replica of Columbus’ ship, The Nina, is docked here too. They’re passing through on their way to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Seeing what it’s like, I can’t imagine going across the Atlantic with no charts in that boat in 1492, but they did.

We had an easy day cruising today. For the one lock that we went through, we called ahead on VHF a mile before we got there and they were open and waiting for us when we arrived.

The Ten-Tom canal was dug through the Tombigbee river in this area and the Army Corps of Engineers used the flatlands and swamps created by the river and straightened it out by digging the canal straight through the area instead of following the many oxbows of the original river. See the picture of the chart page. It’s like that for miles and miles. This also created many beautiful bays and cutoffs from the main channel like the one pictured. It’s the old river channel that was bypassed but is still connected to the Ten-Tom canal. In most places where they cut off an oxbow, they also filled in one of the ends so there is no flow through the old bend, just a large river bend with only one end connected to the canal system. Looks like excellent fishing and great places to build a house with a great dock, but then you’ve gotta’ live in Backwaters, Mississippi……. and it’s so hard to get a good brie here………

We’re at Aberdeen Marina in Aberdeen, MS tonight, after an easy cruising day with beautiful, warm, sunny weather. It got up to 78 degrees this afternoon. This is the first day in a long time that we have run the boat from our flybridge, which, except for a bimini sunshade, is open to the weather.

The entrance to the Aberdeen Marina is an unnerving, twisting and turning narrow channel through a cypress swamp. The water on either side of the channel is obviously one to two feet deep and full of logs and cypress knees, with only the thin red and green channel marker poles to mark it. While I would call it an extremely well marked channel, it’s still creepy to go through. In the picture shown, the channel goes straight back towards the grassy shore and there are 3 red and 3 green thin marker poles visible.

The marina itself is small but very nice and they have a free courtesy car for transient boaters to drive into town. The courtesy car is a huge 1980’s white Lincoln Town Car…. A veritable land yacht. Not everything on the car works, but it’s free and it got us there and back. I believe we could have seated four people across on that front bench seat. We went to the Big Star market to buy a few groceries.

The locks on the Ten-Tom have been really great compared to what we’re used to in Illinois. We usually count on an average one hour wait at locks before we can get in. We have waited up to 4 ½ hours for locks and once averaged 4 hours per lock on a 2 day trip through 4 locks. On the Ten-Tom, we have usually either gone right in when we got there or have waited a matter or 5 to 10 minutes. At the locks today, two were zero wait and one was 55 minutes. Yesterday all three locks we did were zero wait. We also really like using the floating bollards at the locks, which they always let you do here. They are very large heavy floating drums in a sealed channel at the side of the lock. They have huge cleats to tie your boat to so when the water goes up or down, your boat just follows it easily. Instead of 2 people holding on to ropes dropped from the top of the lock at the bow and stern of the boat. The “floaters” are much easier.

We are in Midway Marina, halfway through the Ten-Tom canal going towards the Tombigbee river. There’s a TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) park in walking distance, but nothing else worth seeing. The Midway Marina is near Fulton, MS, which is near nuthin’ at all, and as far as we can tell, is almost nuthin’ at all itself. There are cypress swamps along the rivers, one of which is pictured. These are really just flooded land where cypress trees have started growing in the shallows, making their own beginnings of future cypress swamps. In one of these, right next to our marina, we saw a pileated woodpecker this evening. It’s absolutely huge and has a very large red cockade behind its head so that it looks like it has a beak on both sides of it’s head. It also makes a very loud, low drumming when it pecks at dead trees.

We walked over to see the TVA park and it had a very nice visitor center explaining about construction of the canal. It’s the largest canal in the world in terms of the amount of earth excavated to make it…..bigger than the Suez Canal and the Panama Canal!

There are lots of locks here. One of the three we went through today had an 85 ft. drop. By the time you’re at the bottom, you feel like a sardine in a very large sardine can. That’s a picture from the top of one of today’s locks. You can see the lower river way beyond and way down from the water in the lock. We’ll go through 3 more locks tomorrow and will stay at Aberdeen Marina, which is supposed to have the lowest diesel fuel prices around these parts. Since we run at fairly slow speeds on the rivers and canals, we have been getting better fuel mileage, so I have not refueled for a long time, waiting for Aberdeen. I hope they’re not out when we get there!

We had our usual Sunday morning breakfast today…..donuts and coffee and read the Sunday paper. There’s a small “Big Star” grocery store near the marina that has a bakery/deli and they make really good donuts. I also discovered that they have an early morning breakfast bar set up with sausage, scrambled eggs, grits and waffles. While I was there, about half a dozen men came in to get breakfast to go (in a brown bag and each had a pickup truck, wore blue jeans with a wide belt, a tight black T-shirt, and a plaid wool shirt. It’s like they had on the official local uniform, even though they clearly didn’t know each other.

Lots of people refer to people doing the Great Circle Route as Loopers……“Great Loop Route” is more common than “Great Circle Route”, I find. We learned from other Loopers that 2 locks further south between here and Mobile will be closed for maintenance from 11/14 through 11/20. One is at Pickensville and one at Coffeeville. The boat 2 slips down from us here at Grand Harbor marina is a local resident, but he’s taking his 65 ft. Marquis down to Orange Beach, AL just East of Mobile for the winter. He is leaving Wednesday to beat the lock closings and make it through to Mobile by 11/14. The couple we were cruising with on the Ohio are also going to speed up to beat the lock closings. However, we’ve decided to stick with our original plan which will take us through the Pickensville lock before 11/14 and will leave us stuck between locks for the one week in and around Demopolis. We can stay at Demopolis and cruise the Black Warrior river if we want. Then we can pass the Coffeeville lock after 11/20. Kathy says she read that a number of cruisers bring their boats down to Demopolis to spend the winter, so there should be good boat facilities. As long as they don’t discover more problems once they start working on the Coffeeville lock and decide to close it longer, this fits our schedule fine.

So we decided to stay another day here at Grand Harbor and look at real estate, just for fun. Since we’re now far enough south that people don’t have to winterize their boats, it’d be interesting to consider either having a home or a condo with a boat dock down here. We were directed to a local real estate mogul……actually the guy that built this huge marina and condo property. He gave us 3 hours of his time and drove us all around the area, showing us many of the possibilities, plus he has lived here all of his life and is a fount of information on the area. We saw homes and empty lots with spectacular views (like the one of 3 states out of our front windshield below) and got an excellent understanding of the area from this gentleman. No sales pitch at all, even tough many of them were his properties. We did see 2 beautiful lots right on the water in a beautiful cove, out of the waves, for about $500K. They are in a new fancy sub-development. Kathy says if we ever do buy a new house, she wants a bare lot so she can design it herself. We both think we’re most likely to stay in Illinois and just bring the boat south in the winters. But it was fun to look and we had the perfect host to show us around. We may do the same thing further south too, so we can compare.

It was another bright sunny day and driving through the countryside in these fall colors is really beautiful. I didn’t know Mississippi and Alabama had such gorgeous foliage in the fall.

We drove to Huntsville, AL today, about 2 hours away, to see NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center museum. Huntsville is the site where many of the large rockets and capsules were built for the Apollo missions and also for today’s space shuttles. NASA has a sprawling exhibit over about 40 acres displaying parts of their huge collection of obsolete missiles, space capsules, rocket engines, space suits, the backup moon rover, a moon rock, etc. with an IMAX theater showing Apollo missions to the moon and the Mars rover project, plus there is a “Space Camp” for school children to participate in astronaut type training over a period of days.

It also has a strange collection of other seemingly unrelated things like a Blackbird spy plane, UH1H Vietnam era helicopter, a motorcycle built by Orange County Choppers dedicated to space exploration (a disturbing use of federal tax dollars to build a display for this even though I’m sure Orange County Choppers donated the bike as a publicity stunt), and army recruiting stations.

Overall the space related items and rocket historical engineering parts and pieces were very interesting and the museum was very worthwhile to see. The upkeep of the museum buildings, grounds and displays leave something to be desired, but that’s the status of things like this competing for tax dollars with other federal programs. The huge size of these items is amazing. The upright rocket in the picture with Kathy is just a Saturn I. There’s a Saturn V rocket that’s far too large to display upright and it is on its side in 6 big pieces that is substantially longer than a city block. Even on its side, it’s about 30 ft. tall!

I had taken the corroded cast iron riser manifold from my port engine to a local welding shop so I would have a spare pipe in case one of the other 3 on the boat develops the same problem. The welder was highly recommended by a very large full service marina about one mile down the Ten-Tom canal from us. He did an excellent job jacketing the corroded parts with ¼ inch steel pipe and brazing it to the cast iron. He had to heat the whole large pipe almost to red hot with his torch first to prevent stress cracks from forming in the cast iron if it were heated just where he was welding. I hope I never need it, but it’s now $295 worth of insurance for parts that are impossible to get.

We saw Shiloh, National Military Park, today. It was an extremely interesting, well done and even deeply moving experience. It was a beautiful, bright, sunny but cool day and the fall colors were at their peak here, unlike the spring days of the April, 1862 battles. The battlefields were well marked, well cared for and sometimes filled with monuments erected after the war by various states involved. It’s a National Park, so the park rangers are NPS rangers. They had sold out of the self-led car and walking tour CD at the bookstore so one of the park rangers loaned us a copy of the CD he had. The CD explained the battle and battlefields really well, guiding us away from the normal geographical progression car tour path to many tour points taken in a battle chronology point of view. Actual quotes from battle participant’s memoirs and army records added to the realism and understanding of the significance of this 2 day battle where more American lives were lost than in the entire Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican war. There were 23,746 killed, wounded or missing in action. The bravery and resolve of both sides was stunning, considering that practically none had experienced battle before, and the vagaries of war and pure luck played equal parts with both brilliant and poor military strategy. And yes, Jay, Grant did say "Retreat, No!, I propose to attack at daylight and whip them", and with Buell's army helping, he did so, even after Beauregard had wired home that the Union Army suffered a complete defeat and the Confederacy had won.

The picture is one of “the sunken road”, called the “hornet’s nest” by the Confederates due to the constant buzzing sounds of bullets and shrapnel flying through the air near them. The park, understandably, is the largest collection of actual Civil War cannon in the world.

What wasn’t covered, but what we talked about over and over as we walked these hallowed grounds, was what drove the ordinary men to enlist so eagerly and fight so gallantly for the Union and Confederate sides. Just to say that the South wanted states rights and to preserve a way of life, and the North wanted to preserve the union, is to oversimplify the human dynamics, but we didn’t resolve anything in our discussion today either.

We’re at Grand Harbor Marina, one mile down the Ten-Tom Canal, right at the intersection of three states.

The picture from the bow of Nonchalance in the marina shows Tennessee on the right, Alabama straight across the water and Mississippi across the river to the left. We plan to stay here a week and get an Enterprise Rentacar to see the Tennessee and Kentucky area. Wednesday is supposed to be nice, so we’re going to see Shiloh, the civil war battlefield which we passed on the river today.









I have been marking the Great Circle Route Map in red as we move. It’s starting to show some progress.

We stayed last night in Pebble Isle Marina on Kentucky lake, which is a huge lake full of picturesque scenes, homes and trailer parks along the banks, and levees built out of riprap (truckloads of big rocks dumped down the river banks to stop erosion), vacation homes built on 15 ft. pilings above the 20 ft. levees to protect against floods (see picture).








There are also palisades of sandstone carved out by the river over the ages past. This picture of the palisades isn’t unusual palisade, they are like that all up and down the river here. The Fall colors are beautiful now, but we haven’t had enough sun to really enjoy them. The picture was taken when the sun was out for a while, but it’s been too cloudy and cold. Yesterday (Sunday) was the only beautiful day recently, with temps in the 70s. It was nice to wear short sleeved shirts and walk around feeling warm.





The sunset was this evening after we tied up at the marina. It was about 5:30 PM after sundown.















Oh, yeah….my sis, Beth, wanted a picture of Daisy so here’s a couple from today.

We saw Paducah yesterday.
It’s a very nicely done river town for the old part of downtown. Lots of antique stores and low key tourist things. The real downtown and residential areas are like any small city or big town. We didn’t go to the quilt museum, because we have seen that previously.

Today (Friday) was another cloudy, rainy day, but we went out for a drive (good old Enterprise Rentacar) to see the Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area. It’s a well developed, well cared for nature playground of woods and lakes. The fall colors were in their prime, but no sun so no pictures. We enjoyed it anyhow, but it would have been spectacular if the weather would have cooperated. It’s run by ther Dept of Agriculture, not the National Park Service because it’s not a national park. They still have park rangers, they just work for a different department, like our son, Mike, did this year at Grand Coulee Dam’s Lake Roosevelt Recreation Area.


Land Between the Lakes has the largest buffalo (bison) herd in the world, according to their visitor center, and there were five or so eating the lush grass near the road we were on. They are absolutely huge…..like the size of a VW bus. We also saw some of their elk herd.

Near the middle of the recreation area. you can drive out of the woods on highways to little towns like Cadiz, KY, where we went for lunch. It’s pronounced “K-dis” unlike the Cadiz, OH near where Mom grew up, which is “Ka-deese” to the locals. There’s a well known road stop famous for their smoked bacon and hams, and we got a few for tasting. They’ll be in some of our breakfasts and lunches on the water in the next few days.


Cadiz also has “Porky’s B BQ” which is a roadside trailer stand and a big smoker grill mounted on a trailer. They only have two real BBQ items, a pulled pork sandwich, which is another huge pile of meat with the spicy hot vinegar sauce steeped into the meat, and huge 2 inch thick pork chops. The pork chops are boneless butterfly chops that are 2 in. thick when they’re put in to the hickory smoker. They’re served 2 on a plate or one in a hamburger bun, again drenched in the spicy vinegar BBQ sauce. Kathy had the pork plate and I had the pork chop sandwich. The picture doesn’t even do it justice……..but I ate it all.

Tomorrow (Sat.) morning, we’ll leave for the trip down Kentucky Lake towards the Ten-Tom canal. There may not be good phone service so we may be off-line for a while.

We visited the back roads of Kentucky today and went to Paducah.

The back roads were very pretty, hilly pasture land with mostly cattle and horse farms. Where there was good floodplain bottom land, they were harvesting soybeans today. I gathered from the farmers at a restaurant in Paducah that the beans came in good here this year, but the corn came in very poorly. The fall colors were excellent, but it was cloudy all day so the effect was rather muted, but the scenery was very much Kentucky.

We stopped at a virtually unknown natural “attraction", marked only by a small historical marker signpost for Mantle Rock along the side of a 2-lane highway. It is owned by the Nature Conservancy, of which Kathy is a member, and is open to the public if you see the sign and know to go up the one lane dirt road, park before the road gets too muddy and walk half of a mile or so to the entrance gate, which has just enough open space to walk in. Then walk another quarter mile through heavily wooded trails down to a stream and a HUGE natural arch formed by limestone and water and weather actions on the stone. It’s very impressive to come upon it walking through the woods. That's Kathy's winter coat she's wearing today. It was down in the 30's last night and barely broke 50 degrees today. We're heading going farther south on Saturday.

We went to Paducah to get a new battery for Kathy’s cell phone and a wireless card for my laptop, plus we ate dinner at a local (local to the point that I don’t know if it was a bar or a greasy spoon restaurant) Barbeque called “The Backwoods”. Mostly farmers and locals. You know you’ve crossed over from Southern Illinois by the decidedly southern drawl that is the norm here. The BBQ sauce was the very liquid southern kind with vinegar and hot spices that seeps into the meat…..I liked it. Kathy’s pulled pork plate had enough meat to feed three hungry lumberjacks. Daisy will get some of that.

So…….this’ll be a long blog entry. After five long days on the Mississippi, Ohio and Cumberland rivers, anchoring out in the middle of nowhere and almost no facilities, no marinas, no fuel stops, we are at Green Turtle Bay Marina in Grand Rivers, KY. It's a beautiful, large, full service marina at the North end of Lake Barkley, which, with Kentucky Lake, forms the "Land Between The Lakes", a huge natural recreation area that is effectively a 30 mile long, 5 mile wide island with thousands of miles of shoreline, islands, and scenic beauty. We'll be staying here at least 4 days to explore the area, see Paducah and enjoy the ease of marina life compared to boating and anchoring out.

On Thursday, Oct. 19th, we left Alton IL for the trip down the Mississippi, up the Ohio River to the Cumberland River and down to Lake Barkley. The boat performed well all 5 days and the fixed engine riser manifold is a complete and permanent fix, working as it should.


Going by St. Louis was a ho-hum because they've done nothing with their waterfront. No places to stop or see, all dirty commercial stuff except to see the arch as you pass. However, all the river days were eventful and somewhat of a hassle due to almost zero boating facilities.








Thursday night, we stayed at Hoppie's Marina on the Mississippi. The "marina" is just 4 large barges with some floating docks, all floating in the current of the Mississippi. They were completely full, with about 20 transient boats and maybe 30 small resident boats tied up there. They did have fuel, water and electric there. We walked up a long gangway to the bank and about 1/4 mile into the town of Kimswick for a very nice dinner. There were lots of long walks with Daisy. The picture of Hoppie's shows the barges and one mega-yacht with 3 Hatteras yachts in a row behind it. We're the last (and smallest) Hatteras in the lineup. Very unusual to see 3 Hatts together.......is that a "Hatt trick"?

Friday night we tied up to the lock wall at the Kaskaskia River lock. It was an easy, uneventful day and a fine place to tie up for the evening. The only problem was that we could only get off the boat and walk on the large lock walkway on top of the lock entrance walls. It was not connected to land, just a long narrow cement walkway. We walked the dog on the walkway, but she really prefers grass so she was hesitant to do her thing on the cement. She did, once, on her 3rd walk at about 10:30 PM, and then wouldn't on the next morning's walk, so she had to wait 18 hours until 4:30 PM Friday when we anchored and got out the dinghy. That was a record, but she made it. There was literally no place to stop between Kaskaskia and Hoppie's.

On Saturday we went down the Mississippi to the Ohio river and up the Ohio towards the Cumberland river. We have been running at "slow cruise" speed, which saves a huge amount of fuel and makes it easier to dodge the logs, branches and whole trees and other flotsam in the Mississippi and Ohio. There were plenty of "deadheads" which we dodged. (No that's not Greatful Dead groupies floating down the river.....a “deadhead” is a large log, some the size of telephone poles, that is so waterlogged that one end sinks down to the bottom of the river and only the top few inches is floating above the surface. VERY hard to see and dangerous to hit because they're big enough to destroy props, rudders, etc.)



Surprisingly, the Ohio river was twice as muddy and had ten times more flotsam than the Mississippi. It's probably just a condition made by storms in the Ohio Valley making the rivers rise and picking up silt, mud, logs, refrigerators, etc. There's a picture of the confluence of the waters between the Mississippi and Ohio where there's a line separating the two colors as they first contact each other. The water at the boat is the Mississipppi and the Ohio is muddier and farther away, halfway across the water.

Saturday night, we anchored in a small diversion channel which had about 10 ft of water depth but was very narrow. We put out 2 anchors and stretched between the stern and bow anchors so the wind wouldn't blow our stern against the shore, grounding our props and rudders. We had to run the dog in the dinghy all the way across the Mississippi to a huge, beautiful sand bar beach which was about 2 miles long, 1,000 ft wide and totally uninhabited except by millipedes and one beached red channel marker. Daisy liked it fine. That evening, another Great Circle Route boat, “Loose Stones”, came to anchor in the channel behind us. I explained to them about our bow and stern anchors and they did likewise. They also had a dog named Daisy, a large yellow lab, and I explained that the channel we were anchored in was too muddy and rocky to work well so the beach across the river was best. I had marked a good dinghy landing spot where the sand was steep enough on approach to beach the dinghy. When we first went, I had to get out in one foot deep water and haul the dinghy the last 6 ft to shore, so I walked the beach and found a deeper landing site. We invited the other couple, Bill and Jane Stone, over for drinks and munchies on our aft deck. They are a very enjoyable couple and we have stayed cruising together for the last 3 days. They’re 3 slips down the dock here at Green Turtle Bay Marina and we enjoyed a dinner with them last night here in Kentucky near the marina.

On Sunday, we awoke to find that the stern anchor worked fine overnight, but the bow anchor had dragged and the boat was crosswise in the channel with the stern in the center of the channel and the bow was almost onshore. The boat was not grounded, but as it turned it hung up the stern anchor line on the rudders or props so I couldn't raise the stern anchor. Kathy didn't like going all the way across the Mississippi and the shipping channel, so she wanted to take the dog up the muddy banked channel and land on rock fill under a bridge, which we did, only to find everything all big rocks, muddy and Daisy got full of burrs and did nothing. So we took her across to the big beach again and she was happy. After we got back and put the dinghy back on the roof, I figured I could haul in the bow anchor and the current would push the bow downstream, possibly turning the boat releasing the stern anchor line. It worked and the stern anchor tension pulling astern freed the anchor line from whatever it was caught on under the boat and the anchor held us in the middle of the little channel against the current. The only problem was that the bow anchor rope had tangled in an impossibly tight knot around the anchor winch capstan and it could not be released. The only way to unwrap the knot was to take the shackle off the anchor and manually unwind the rope from the winch. That worked fine, but as I took the shackle off, I let the anchor slip and it launched itself, just as it is designed to do, into the diversion channel............with no rope attached! It’s still there at the bottom of that channel. I believe this qualifies as my dumbest stunt ever in boating. No harm, no foul, but our backup anchor became our primary anchor.

Then, of course, Sunday night became our most challenging anchoring situation. “Loose Stones” had cruised with us that day an we planned on anchoring together behind a sand bar on the Ohio river where some cruising books recommended that there was anchoring room out of the channel in about 10 ft. deep water. When we got there, the sand bar was completely under water and the anchoring spot was really just anchoring in about 20 ft. of water out in the river about 300 ft. from shore. The current was strong and a 10 to 25 knot wind added 1 ft. waves. I could get our anchor to set and hold, but it wouldn’t hold against the power of an engine in reverse, which is a sure way to know it will hold all night. Bill Stone had a second anchor that is identical to ours, but had 50 ft. of chain that helps hold it down. He loaned us that anchor to try. It would set and hold, but not much better than ours without the chain, but we decided to stay the night there because there were no better options and I don’t want to cruise at night. The current was running fast under the boat, making lots of lapping gurgling noises, and the fast current was causing our port propeller to freewheel, turning at about 100 RPM with the motors off, and making a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh sound in the aft stateroom. I went to the port engine room and tied a rope around an engine support and wrapped it around the tunring propshaft, which stopped the propeller from turning. Our Allison marine gears don’t like freewheeling the props, so it’s better to stop them.

With the whooshing, lapping and gurgling of the current, the blowing wind, the dinghy horsing against the stern rope and bangint the swim platform and the possibility of the anchor dragging, Kathy couldn’t sleep at all. I offered to stand watch, but she just stayed up all night. I shoed her how to check our position versus the shore with our big roof mounted searchlight, but it didn’t help much. I’m sure she felt that if she went to sleep, we’d wake up back in the Mississippi and halfway to New Orleans or as a bow ornament on a barge.

Monday morning came with a welcome and pretty sunrise and we took both dogs to shore in our dinghy and finally got what was an “early start” about 8 AM. It was a nice cruising day and the water color was much better in the Cumberland river than the Ohio, no longer muddy brown. We made it to the Barkley Lock and Green Turtle bay about 3 PM Monday.

Today is Tuesday and Green Turtle Bay Marina can get me another big main anchor by Friday morning. They had a used 45 lb. CQR for $150, but I wanted the larger 60 lb. CQR anchor shipped here “3 day select”, so we’ll have a new, maybe better anchor, and I’ll have a $1000 story to tell. (ouch!)

We have an Enterprise rental car for the next 3 days to see the area and go to Paducah. It should be fun. Wait! That’s what I said before we started out on the last 5 days! Oh well, some of it was fun…………and we’re getting further South!

It's fixed! I had a corroded riser pipe, which is a heavy cast iron manifold that carries hot exhaust to the turbine. The manufacturer was out of stock for possibly months............and winter's coming!

The welding specialist shop I took it to was doubtful it could be fixed because it was so far gone, and they'd have taken a week or more just to find out.........and winter's coming!

But the Hatteras Owner's Forum members came through. Dave DiSesa "CaptDis" sold me a spare one he had cheap and got it shipped overnight to me from Florida. I installed it today and both diesels are now running fine again.

I know it's not the last major problem we'll have on a trip of this magnitude, but as Kathy says, maybe we just used up a piece of our bad luck and we're "good-to-go" again. Somewhere, we may even have a problem that makes this one look "not major" at all, but we'll deal with whatever comes up.

Tomorrow morning we'll start down the Mississippi again. There are no marinas and few places to get fuel until we go up the Ohio river and through the lock to the Tennessee river. Another Great Circle Route boat couple we met down the dock from us is afraid he can't make it between available fuel docks to the Tennessee river. I told him to just go slow and carry extra fuel. It's amazing how much your fuel use per mile drops when try life in the slow lane. We also met Janie Hermann here at the Alton Marina. She's the USCG certified captain we hired to help us get our boat home after buying it in New York. She's running a SeaRay express cruiser to Florida for it's owner. We'll both be tied up to the lock wall at the entrance to the Kaskaskia river tomorrow night and then anchor out for 2 days. Should be fun.

We visited a few small Mississippi river towns today, and took Daisy for the ride. We saw Fort du Chartres, which was a French stone fort built around 1740 with excellent stone mason work, much of which has been restored. See picture. It was French until the Brittish took over about 1755 and then the Americans took it over about 1785.

Then we visited the Kascaskia lock, where we'll likely spend Thursday night tied up at the lock wall. It's one of the few places to overnight on the Mississippi river between St. Louis and the Ohio river.

We also went to Kahokia where we saw the church for the oldest existing parish in the USA. The church (see picture...that;s Kathy on the sidewalk) with vertical log construction, was built around 1705, but the parish was established in 1699.



Possible good news on the engine exhaust manifold pipe is that I bought a reconditioned used one from Dave DiSesa ("CaptDis" on the Hatt Owners Forum) and it was shipped today via overnight delivery to arrive tomorrow.

First Mechanical Problem! Today when I went to check the oil, I found soot deposits on the exhaust manifold next to the exhaust riser heatshield on the port engine. I took the turbo and heatshield off of that side and discovered small holes in the riser pipe (which carries hot exhaust from the manifold to the turbine). You can see one or two in the picture where I cleaned the soot from the pipe.

I was able to get the bolts unscrewed (lucky I didn't break one due to major heat cycling of those joints in the exhaust system) and took the pipe off. I found the Detroit Diesel part number and called Detroit Diesel (engine manufacturer) in St. Louis. They told me it wasn't a DD part, which is dumb because I have the DD part number in my DD books. I didn't even bother to explain to them, I just called DD in Carlo Stream, IL where they know what they're talking about. Unfortunately, the part is unavailable for a month at least, due to a parts production foulup at DD :-( :-(

I took the part to a welding shop in hopes that they could weld it enough for a temporary fix. They said "maybe", so I left it there to for them to try. I had been asking people on the Hatteras Owner's Forum their opinion and explaining my predicament and some kind Hatteras oowner offered to let me have a spare pipe he has :-) So, if it fits and I can get it here from Florida, maybe we'll be back to cruising. Or maybe the welding shop can work some magic on the holed old pipe.

Meanwhile, Kathy has places she wants to see in lower Illinois and maybe Paducah, so we'll spend a couple more days in St. Louis.

We visited St. Louis for the last 2 days. Friday, Jim Grove and his wife, Dudley, gave us a tour of neat things like the “New Cathedral” with spectacular mosaics covering the entire interior of the church, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, beautiful private development homes from around 1900, the Campbell House (a complete time capsule of home and furnishings from around 1870) and the Missouri Contemporary Art Museum, where their daughter is the Director of Operations, and the big downtown St. Louis Park. The best part about it was having Dudley as a tour guide because she’s a veritable walking encyclopedia of information about many things concerning St. Louis and she seems to know everybody in many of these institutions. Also Jim is a Hatteras owner and cruiser and has many interesting stories about cruising. They keep their Hatt in Ft Lauderdale and go to the Bahamas frequently. This summer they cruised it up to their place in Nova Scotia. So it was lots of fun.

On Saturday, our son, Mike, drove down from Chicago to stay for a couple days. We saw the Arch, of course and rode the teeny tube shaped elevator cars up to the top (that’s the crowd at the top of the Arch). It’s bigger and more imposing than I expected. We also saw the Melvin Price lock and dam where they have a barge driving exhibit with a full size barge pilothouse and 3 windows with big TV screens to use for a barge operator simulator. I hit the lock wall L Then on Sunday we drove up to the wine country and saw a couple wineries. The Stone Hill Winery was excellent with a complete tour and wine tasting. My tastes don’t run towards Missouri wine though, but still fun.

Thursday Oct 12th - We're in Alton Illinois on the Mississippi River. The bridge over the Mississippi at Alton is really beautiful (that's half of it in the picture, taken at the Alton Marina from the bow of Nonchalance. The last 3 days have been all river travel, anchoring out, no marinas, on our own with the river. It makes you kind of closer to nature. No cell phone coverage much of the time, but not much need for phones either.

We did have some excitement with the dinghy, which we use to take Daisy for walks morning noon and night. Two nights ago we were anchored in a chute (long alternate waterway around a big island) and we had the dinghy tied to the swim platform ladder of Nonchalance. In the morning after we took Daisy, the wind came up and was blowing Nonchalance dangerously close to the shore of the narrow channel, so I decided to fire up the engines and back move the stern towards center channel. When I did, the dinghy rope came off the swim ladder and the dinghy started heading down the chute towards the main river channel. We had to weigh anchor quickly and go after it! Luckily, the wind came up again and blew the dinghy back up the chute towards us and Kathy was able to hook it with our long boathook by standing on the bow pulpit. I'm glad she did because I had my swimsuit out and was going to swim after it if we couldn't safely get close with the big boat. BRRRRRR.......

Last night, we anchored in front of a beautiflu island and right across the main channel from a nice sand and shell beach we could dinghy to. When we got up to do that this morning, we were scraping frost off the dinghy seats to take Daisy. Then when we came back, I let a dock line slip out and trail from the dinghy and it got wrapped around the prop. It would back up but not go forward, but after 5 minutes of backing against the current and getting water in the boat from the automatic deck drain holes, which let out the back, I tilted up the motor and luckily was able to unwrapp the line, after which the dinghy worked fine. Kathy was expecting a huge barge to come around the bend any minute and run us over. When she saw the water coming in from from the deck drains, she was reaching for the life jackets........... Of course, as soon as we went forward, the water ran back out. Oh well, that's how you learn not to make those dumb mistakes.

Everything else on the boat has worked well.........I'll keep my fingers crossed and my tools handy. I brought lots of tools.

The rivers and the palisades on the Mississippi have been beautiful. The fall colors are just starting to really show, which makes that first harmonizing mixture of the green trees still left with the reds and yellows of the first to go. We've seen a number of bald eagles, lots of white pelicans, ospreys, etc. all fishing on the river.

We'll spend the next 3 or 4 days in St. Louis. Our son, Mike will join us tomorrow evening. Tonight, we met Jim Grove, a friend from the Hatteras Owners Forum. Jim and his friend George took us to dinner at a very nice restaurant. Jim will loan us a car tomorrow and maybe he and his wife, Dudley, will come with us to see the city. Jim lives in St. Louis, has his 50 ft. Hatteras in Ft. Lauderdale and takes it to the Bahamas in Spring. He took it up the east coast to Nova Scotia this summer....quite a trip.

Day two and we're at the Illinois Valley Yacht Club in Peoria.

Another beautiful, warm, sunny day. We spent the afternoon up on the flybridge where the views are great and you can feel the day on the river. We stopped at Hennepin for lunch. Hennepin is a very small town with only 2 blocks of "downtown" and a public square with the courthouse. Then, after a few blocks of houses, you're out in the fields again. Hennepin sank a big barge up against the river bank and filled it up to create a nice public free dock right at "downtown". The old cleats on the barge are great for tying up and there's 6 ft. of water at the edge of the barge, so any size boat can just tie up and walk into town (see picture). A hardware store, grain elevator, food store, a restaurant, a boat and marine supplies store, an office for 2 local attorneys and the courthouse is about it. Nice friendly people.

After lunch, we saw an adult bald eagle fishing in the river. He didn't catch one even though there was a near miss as he swooped down, skimming the water and plunged his talons in, only to come up empty. Some fish is down there saying "Mom, a bird came and scratched my back!"

We also saw dozens of "balooning spiders". There are very long spider web strands floating in the air 10 to 20 feet above the water, each with a little white fuzz-ball of web strands and a very small spider attached. These are even out in the middle of the river where we were 500 ft. from land to either bank. I have no idea how they get started and how they get up that high. As the boat goes past one, the strand may catch on a radio antenna or the bimini top and then the spider will eventually end up on the boat.

We definitely enjoyed the nice weather, but NOAA is saying it'e going to turn cold, so we'll be inside the salon for a while, keeping warm, as we head to St. Louis.

October 8th finally came and we're on our way!

We're anchored out at Buffalo Rock tonight (see picture below) after a beautiful trip down the Illinois river to just above Starved Rock State Park.

Last night, our son, Stephen and his girlfriend, Beth came down to the boat and made a fancy dinner for us including a champaigne Bon Voyage. We were having breakfast on the boat with them before departing when 6 dear friends surprised us by showing up with coffee, donuts and fruit salad for all. How nice!

We made excellent time today because we never had to wait for a lock!! When we fired up the diesels at our marina, lots of marina residents came down to wish us well and we called the closest lock (Dresden) and found that they were just filling to take pleasure craft down. We left in a hurry, and got to the lock as they were opening the doors. It takes a while to get this big boat up on plane now that we've loaded her to the gills with clothes, food, gear and full fuel tanks ($3.10 today). A tank of fuel costs one "boat buck".

After a nice stop-over to walk Daisy at Marsailles Island, we cruised up to the Marsailles Lock just as they were letting boats in for the trip down. Lock wait time = zero all day!

We anchored at Buffalo rock, ran the dinghy to take Daisy again and had a nice dinner on the aft deck after watching a rather uneventful sunset.

Everything worked great today. Good fortune and a host of mechanical items all coincided to produce an "normal" day, of which there actually very few. I can't post pictures because I'm using my cell phone modem (slow 14.4K).

One day done.........and we're on schedule. Lots more days to come.