Wednesday 30 December 2020 Joe
Wheel State Park Marina
Yesterday, we turned in the
U-Haul truck, and the bill was $5340, juuuust a leeetle over the $445 it was
supposed to be. It took overnight to
correct the error, but it certainly tested my steam pressure relief valve. It seems that when the 10-foot box truck I
was supposed to get in Panama City was dead-lined and they gave me the bigger
15-footer, the initial mileage from the 10-footer, which was 14,000 miles LESS than
the larger truck. When it came time to
deal with the extra mileage charge at forty cents a mile; well, you can do the math….
Because we expected to be here
until Saturday due to adverse weather, we rented a car from Enterprise yesterday, but we ended up
turning it back in today because we appear to have a short weather window
tomorrow which should see us safely through the Wheeler and Wilson lock and
into the top of the Tom Bigbee Waterway at Safe Harbor Aqua Marina before it gets stormy Thursday night. Time will tell. Hope to be writing how boringly successful
tomorrow was this time tomorrow night.
One of today’s accomplishments
was the buying and installing (if you call double sided tape installing) two automobile dash compasses, one on the flying
bridge console, and one at the lower helm.
Hard to believe there has never been a compass on this boat. I will give them a sanity check using the laptop chart plotter.
We plan to transit the Wheeler Dam lock (48-foot drop) and the Wilson Dam lock (93-foot drop) for a total drop of 141 feet by around lunch time if all works according to plan. The Wheeler Lock is just around the corner about three miles away; so how well we can get this floating box to behave in the williwaws blowing through the lock will be very quickly determined. The ten locks after these first two will drop us a further 250 feet for a grand total of 391 feet. I think I feel my ears popping.
