We're On the Mississippi (But Not Without Some Excitement)

As those of you who are following us closely know, we're cooling our heals a bit waiting for a reservation at Hoppie's, the Mississippi jumping off point for two very long days to Paducha, Kentucky. This morning as we were preparing to leave Grafton Harbor at the mouth of the Illinois River for the five or six mile cruise to Port Charles up the Missippi, I tried to start the generator (runs the bow and stern thrusters and lets us keep the AC going while underway) but got nothing--literally nothing on the screen.

I checked everything on the master electrical panel, flipped switches off and on--all seemed ok.

Then I crawled down into the lazarette, the contortion requiring space under the deck at the stern of the boat. After looking here and there, I found an "emergency off" switch on the generator itself. It seemed to be in the off position so I turned it on--twice. The second time it rewarded me with the acrid smell of something electrical burning. I probably should have grabbed a fire extinguisher just in case but I was so frustrated, I just stared at it; it stared back.

Port Charles Harbor has a reputation for a good service department so I called them--yes they could have someone look at it--sometime. Ok, we'll be over; we were going anyway.

Time to start the engine. Over and over and over it turned but didn't start. Finally, it did; then it died. Again, died again. Panic. Then it dawned on me; I had had the engine running on just the port tank on our long trip to Grafton Harbor to even it out with the starboard tank that the engine had sipped from the day before. And, when I turned the fuel switch back to both, I had inadvertently confused the switch handle with its pointer and thus turned the fuel off. It's amazing how much easier the engine started and ran with the fuel on.

The trip over is not for the faint of heart. Port Charles Harbor provided these directions:

and the folks at Grafton Harbor had already warned me about uncharted dredging spoils. Well, sure enough, just to our starboard of the deepest charted channel, we hit the spoils. A hard u-turn and a bump of the throttle pushed us back off and into deeper water--lucky. Once burned, twice wary, we turned on our forward looking depth sounder (a great addition to Katahdin over the summer) and we inched along--first down the east side of the Mississippi and then ever so carefully up the west. Jackie is really very good with charts and I like to think I'm not so bad myself. Each of us checked and double checked ourselves and then checked and double checked each other (ok, maybe not in that order) and we finally found the very narrow entrance into Port Charles Harbor without another bump of the bottom. After waiting for a pontoon tour boat with about a dozen elderly women to clear the narrow channel, we threaded the maze into the marina, found our assigned dock, pirouetted 90 degrees with the bow and stern thrusters in opposite directions and backed into our spot. It almost looked like we knew what we were doing!

Ah, all's well, right? Well, almost. Jackie went up to the marina to wash our sheets and towels (remember please that I did it last week) but the washer was broken. We had just left a marina with its laundry all in order. Sigh. She has the marina courtesy car and is doing laundry in St. Charles as I write. I stayed behind waiting for the generator repair tech to show up only to get a call a couple of hours later that he would come tomorrow--can't say when--instead of today. Sigh again. At least it gave me the chance to write this blog.

Did I mention our trip to St. Louis yesterday? My three year old MacBook Pro croaked which is to say the battery ran down quickly and it wouldn't charge except when it was turned off at night. Stubborn as I am, I might have suffered along with that but Jackie, sick of hearing me whine, insisted that I replace it. Long story short, I have a less but still expensive new MacBook Air and my Pro, still on Apple Care, was sent by the Genius Bar folks off to Apple Land to be repaired or replaced. Hopefully, it will be delivered to son, Sam's home, and he'll bring it with him when we meet up for Thanksgiving. I'm liking redundancy more and more.

The best part of this story though might be the 81 year old guy we hired to drive us from Grafton Harbor to the St. Louis Galleria Apple Store and back. Retired as a Special Agent of the US Dept. of Defense Protective Services , the St. Louis County's Sheriff's Office, and a twenty year vet of both the Air Force and Army (the latter of which as a Warrant Officer) who served in both Viet Nam and Desert Storm, he was kind, proud, pleasant, accommodating, a boat lover and talkative. Born and brought up in Missouri, he's been retired with his third wife for 20 years in Grafton on the wrong side of the River. He loves Missouri politics and hates the Illinois "mess". A MAGA Trumper, he told tales of how he dealt with minorities during his days as a deputy sheriff--probably better not repeated in this forum--and bemoaned the public's loss of respect for law officers in today's environment.

He patiently waited for us a lot longer than expected, hunted down a Burger King lunch for me on the way home (the only one of the three of us who hadn't found lunch at the Galleria), and then, unasked, drove us around town showing us his home and neighborhood (very pleasant suburban), the location where a WWII and Viet Nam memorial is being built, the famous Grafton snapping turtle, the best restaurant in town, etc.

Here's the thing, it's easy to demonize the folks supporting Trump and law officers hard on minorities. And frankly, I don't agree with either. But they can be good people, kind and caring, who see the world through lenses crafted by their families over generations and honed through decades of their own experience. They're just different lenses than mine and many of yours.

Stay tuned. I'm hoping we'll get some insight into the generator tomorrow. It's pretty essential--especially since we have a few nights on the anchor coming up.