On the Hard Again

Today we are sitting at the Demopolis Yacht Basin in Alabama. Our boat went on the hard Thursday night for rudder repairs. For the landlubbers that means that the boat was taken out of the water and is on land for rudder repairs. I (Jude) was steering the boat as we were leaving the pumpout station and backed into a bank of clay. With the rudder turned to one side it hit the bank hard and then Danny's Fault lost steerage. To make a long story short. We were taken out of the water and found that the rudder post was bent and the cutlass bearing needed to be replaced (not related to the grounding but to all of the silt in the Mississippi and Illinois river). Hopefully we will be able to float the boat Wednesday or Thursday so we can continue our travels.



In this marina are a lot of boats (big and bigger) that are stored here for hurricane season. This marina is at the 32nd parallel that the insurance companies have proclaimed is above the hurricane zone.



We are now 216 miles from Mobile Bay and we can see some semblance of light at the end of the tunnel. From there it will be only 150 miles to Grand Isle (our destination). When we get to Mobile we hope to see our "surrogate" grandchildren. Courtney and Gabbie are children of Ron and Jessica Lillie who Amanda was a nanny for up in Alaska. Whenever we came into Anchorage we became known as their Alaskan Grandparents. They even met us at the airport one night!






We saw our first alligator about 150 miles upriver from here and our first palmetto 125 miles upriver from here. Lots and lots of Spanish moss. It feels like we are finally getting down south. Some of the river is very boring and some of it is very beautiful. Here is a picture of some of the white cliffs that we have gone past.


Our hope is to be in Grand Isle within a couple of weeks. Our friends Andy and Sue came up from GI yesterday to check out how we were doing. We had a great lunch at the marina pub and we got some information as to our final options as to course to Grand Isle.


Until the accident, we had been traveling with another sailboat out of Michigan. Dulcinea, sailed by Alice and Tom La Belle have been our traveling companions since leaving Kentucky Lake. Their luck has been worse than ours. Aground 3 times, but worse than that, they had to put their 14 year old dog down. Sad day for them. Sometimes being traveling companions means other commitments. Tom's water intake got clogged with some of the vegetation that floats in the river down here. While he worked on the cooling system, we dragged him along behind. All was fixed within a half hour. Since our problems will keep us here a while they have moved on. Oh yes, it was cold that morning. We had frost on the decks two mornings. The temps those two days started in the lower 30s and made it all the way up to about 60. We do not have heat on the boat, but we do have a propane oven. We had a casserole one night and Jude's famous home made pizza the second night.


Jude and Rob