A pluperfect day
Underway at 0640 before one of the crew was out of her
bunk. Another larger faster vessel, the
Fruition, had planned to get underway at 0800, and I spent a lot of the day
looking behind us for them. The weather
was JUST perfect, the kind of cruising weather one wishes for and never gets,
except today, coolish and with a dry air breeze in our faces. Shorts and tee shirt weather. Go up on the flying bridge weather.
Never saw a single barge tow and only 3 or 4 bass boats
all day.
The Helfin Lock was 50 miles distant, and I was thinking
Fruition was going to pass us by and lock up first, but they showed up astern
just as I was calling the lock operator an hour out on the cell phone. The lock operator said he would “reverse the
lock” for us meaning he would lower the water and open the downstream gates so
we could cruise right in. I told
Fruition that, and they elected to slow down and follow us into the lock. About 15 minutes later, we heard a southbound
recreational vessel call the lock to lock down, but by then, my cell call had
gotten him moving water and gates to our advantage, and the southbound guy had
to wait about an hour for us to get into the lock and locked up.
Mary made it known that she desired to get into Columbus
Marina tomorrow early enough to visit a local quilting store, that that idea
wasn’t going to work with my original idea of anchoring Sumter Park at MM 270. So we trudged on along to MM 286 where we anchored
in Windham Cutoff at 1700, astern of the Fruition. 70 miles in 10 hours and 20 minutes – 6.77
measly miles per hour.
Our plan for tomorrow is for us in Pathfinder to get
underway a half hour before Fruition for the 20-mile run to Tom Bevill Lock and
Dam so that we may arrive simultaneously, or nearly so and lock through
together. Hopefully, the lock operator
and any commercial traffic (which has priority over us) will get with Mary’s
ideas and let us pass through the lock expeditiously so we can mosey on up to
Columbus at a decent hour.
And now, to go into the furnace of an engine room and
check the main engine over. Looks like
we used 27 gallons of diesel today at 1800 RPM or 2.6 GPH.
