First night aboard pathfinder

We have completed the food and miscellaneous purchases at Walmart and Wynn Dixie here in Orange Beach and now have it all aboard.  Every corner of the boat is stuffed. 

Because the air conditioning for the section of the house we sleep in has suffered a casualty, and because it will aid us in getting underway early for a relatively long day, we will sleep aboard the boat tonight.  We have to stop for fuel ten miles down the track from here and then get across shallow Mobile Bay before some predicted afternoon storms.  If it does not look like we can beat the storms based on weather radar, we will hang back at the end of the cut into the bay and let the storms clear before proceeding tour anchorage at mile 12 of the Tombigbee Waterway north of Mobile.

Packing

Today we pack up the truck with whatever we are taking along on Pathfinder and depart tomorrow for Orange Beach and my brother Jim's house where the boat is moored.  We have placed a few items like bedding and foul weather gear and our anchor on the boat during previous trips over there, but tomorrow and the next day will be focused on provisioning the boat.

A gentleman who had just purchased a boat on the Mississippi Gulf coast and wanted to get it up the Tombigbee Waterway contacted me for assistance, and we more or less decided that if your schedules meshed that he would follow along behind us.  In the end, we delayed because of adverse river conditions on the Mississippi due to record rains, and he went ahead with an experienced friend to help him.  Now he is reporting back with generally acceptable conditions on the Tombigbee.

Our plan at this point is to depart Orange Beach Wednesday, June 1st, my birthday, grab about 125 gallons of diesel at The Wharf 10 miles along on our run, and get to the Tensaw anchorage just north of Mobile 66 miles along on our planned 1400-mile journey.

Decisions, decisions

The data available from the US Corps of Engineers region to region is differently accessed and displayed, and my initial studies have been focused on the systems other than the Tombigbee Waterway.  When we went up it the first time in October 2006, I knew little to nothing about the system and ferreting out the needed data.  We more or less just went depending on the time of year to yield good cruising, and it did.

I have been spending a lot of time lately on the system and have found that all the dams on the system are currently close to their normal pool levels.  Where there are streamflow measurements, they are in the region of normal for this time of year based on 55-year daily averages.  For the first part of June that is a bit over twice the average for the first part of October.  What that translates to is unknown, but I am guessing it is not much over a couple of miles per hour, and that speed is not uniform in the impounded water between lakes.  It usually means little current leaving a lock and stronger current approaching the next one.  It is a hundred miles between the first two and then gets shorter and short between the next eight locks (we did the last six locks in one lucky day).

 Given that the levels are being kept in the normal range with no big floods as of late, one would assume the amount of debris (always an issue in rivers) would be not be excessive because the water has not been backed up into the woods.  So my risk assessment based on current conditions would say it is a go to get started when we have to depart the Orange Beach area probably May 31st or June 1st.

 

We will likely have to wait a bit at Green Turtle Bay Resort for the Mississippi to recede a bit, but we must get started on this delivery sometime.

This is Pathfinder our Grand Banks 36-foot delivery.

A delivery

Mary and I have agreed to deliver a Grand Banks 36 from Orange Beach, AL to Michigan City, 36-miles east of Chicago on Lake Michigan.  The boat was owned by friends of ours and sold to a Canadian couple.  A couple of years back, I accompanied my friend on an inspection of the boat to Stewart, FL where it had languished at a private pier.  We found the boat to be in good shape except for the exterior wood work, which he later rejuvenated to like new condition.  He and his loyal wife labored mightily to restore the entire boat to like new condition because that's the kind of guy he is, and she the loyal partner she is. But time wore on, and the decision was eventually reach to sell the boat. 

At some point in sale process, I mentioned that I would enjoy delivering the boat to Canada I my friends or the new owner elected not to do so.

Having owned a GB with the same propulsion and generator plants plus having spent a lot of time in the particular boat helping to sort out and label the electrical and fuel systems, I feel quite confident in it to get us successfully up the 1400-mile delivery through five major river systems including a couple of hundred miles of the Mississippi from where we dump into it from the Ohio River until we get off of it above St Louis onto the Illinois River.

We originally planned to get the boat headed north in early May, but tremendous Spring storms across the mid-west flooded the river systems to near record levels making passage up them with this single engine 9-MPH boat impracticable.  Our current plan, based on lowering river levels, is to depart on 29 May 2017 with the boat from Orange Beach, AL, where it has been stored at a pier behind my brother Jim's house for a month.  I am anticipating about 28 underway days to make the trip with a total elapsed time of around six weeks to allow for weather and river condition-induced stops.

Mary and I have been all or most of the way up the first waterway we will encounter (450-mile long Tombigbee) twice, all waters after that will be new to us.

Frolicking with Frolic

This piece was written in September and updated a bit in early 2017 and only just now published.

Mary and I finally came to a decision on renaming our Mainship 30 Pilot II from Stray Dog (a reference to Citadel alumni) to Frolic.  So now we don't go boating; we go for a Frolic.
Frolic came home to roost in its lift in July after that 20,000-lb capacity item was completed.  It is a Deco lift and seems well designed and was installed by Ansley construction.  No more regular bottom jobs, yippee!  No more barnacles growing on hull and running gear.  No more wooden hull to constantly paint and varnish!

With the boat in the lift and equipped with fresh water wash fittings on both main engine and generator, I have been assiduous in keeping them well rinsed after every outing.

Even though our longer ranger cruising days are probably behind us, we like to run to nearby places like Apalachicola - Saint Marks area, Port Saint Joe and even 123 miles west to Orange Beach where we moored behind brother Jim's house alongside his Grand Banks 42.  It was nice to run at 19 knots and get to Jim's in around 8 hours total time.

When I went to Pirates Cove Marina in Panama City Beach to bring the boat home, I experienced batteries too weak to start the engine, despite have run the boat a couple of times during the month-long wait for the lift to be constructed. 

I got the marina to jump start the boat and ran it the fourteen miles to its new home where it sat for three months while I made a bunch of reliability changes including replacement of the ZF electronic shifter with a more reliable Morse shifter and rewiring the DC system to accommodate a new set of house batteries.

Now the boat is ready.