Thursday, 8 June 2017
Some days it’s
just stones
Woke up at 0500 intending to get going for Columbus
Marina 48 miles distant at first light around 0545 only to see a tow trudging
on by our anchorage northbound toward the Tom Bevill Lock just 20 miles up the
waterway. Nuts, there was no way we were
going to catch up to him and bypass him and get in the lock and locked through before
he would arrive there with his sledge-hammer priority over us recreational
vessels. There was nothing for it but to
meekly follow him up to the lock and wait, and wait some more. We ended up sitting around so long that our
anchorage buddy who had intended getting underway around 0730 caught up with us
and locked through with us around 0930.
As we exited Bevill Lock, we got the unwelcomed news from
the operator that our next lock at the Stennis Dam was going to be out of
service for a few hours, but that did not bother us too much since we were 30
miles away and could just cruise along at our usual 7 MPH and take the lock as
it reopened. Well, as we closed in on
the lock the operator encouraged us to speed up and get ahead of the tow which was
now about a mile ahead and going slowly.
We two boats rounded a bend running as fast as we could expecting to see
the tow and saw nothing. Another call to
this not so sharp operator revealed that no, the repairs were not yet complete. In the end, what could have been a 1330
passage of the lock ended up being about a 1700 passage. We idled away the time drifting, poking our
noses into embayments alongside the channel to escape the current, and finally
anchoring with pathfinder hanging onto Fruition who actually dropped the anchor.
Along the way, it became evident that the house bank of
batteries the ones which run the refrigerator, navigation electronics, and just
about every other thing except starting the engine was not being
recharged. Something in the obsolete automatic
charge routing system had given up. I
switch the engine starting batter, which was getting charging voltage from the alternator
into parallel in order to get us here to Columbus Marina where we finally
arrived shortly after exiting the Stennis Lock.
Our trip odometer on one of the chart plotters passed 400
miles today. Just another thousand to
go.
