December 9, 2008
We woke up this morning on our little bend in the river and headed west again down the ICW which changed names to the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway or GIWW somewhere along the way. We had been motoring thru marshy swamps for over a day but the scenery changed fairly quickly into what I thought was a typical Louisiana bayou. The banks of the canal were lined with cypress trees wearing a beard of Spanish moss. The roots of these trees branched out several feet above the soggy ground like tentacles longing for water. The roots were thick and strong, each one almost as thick as the tree they supported , driving down into the soupy mud to anchor the tree
above.
We noticed eagles flying above and took a few pictures of them thinking that we would see more of them now that we were in the bayou. We were wrong, the landscape soon changed and there were no more eagles. As a matter of fact, the landscape went from National Geographic to Industrial Canal in a few miles. Had I known that this was the last of the open Bayou we would see I would have parked the boat and gone ashore on the dinghy and poked around to see what there was to see.
A little bit later we were coming into West Larose LA and once again we were confused as to the name of the bridge that we needed opened. Julie hailed the Hwy 1 bridge several times (the name that the 500 page Coast Guard guide used) and the only reply we got was from some Cajun who sounded like he had a mouth full of Gumbo. We could not understand him at all with our diesel running at 2,000 RPM‘s,. We idled back, called again and the same Cajun replied so we requested a bridge opening. He replied that he was not the bridge tender but was driving the tug that had pulled into the canal about 300 yards ahead of us. He told us that we were hailing the wrong bridge and that we wanted to hail the West Larose bridge. Our Cajun friend had just signed off when the West Larose bridge tender came on the radio and introduced himself. Julie requested a bridge opening using her silky smooth, maple syrup with confectioners syrup heaped on top of it voice, and he replied that he would as soon as he got some workers off of the bridge as they were working on it. Julie thanked him and he replied, “We’ll take care of you baby”, which in most parts of this country would sound incredibly sexist but seemed perfectly natural and polite here.
We motored another few hours and arrived in Amelia Louisiana which is one of a cluster of 3 cities that include Berwick, Morgan City bunched together on the GIWW (ICW) that begging their pardon should have been one city based on their size and the fact that we hadn’t seen one real city in 2 days. It turns out that all 3 of these cities are primarily in the commercial boating business as they sit at an intersection of the GIWW and an inlet from the Gulf of Mexico that passes thru the Atchafalaya Bay where ocean going vessels can pass.
All that aside, we were looking to get 40 or so gallons of diesel to top off our tanks because we had read that fuel on this stretch of the waterway was virtually impossible to come by. We went online with Google maps and the only thing we could find was a couple of gas stations that were anywhere from 2 blocks to 1 mile from the water. There was one gas station that was next to a creek that looked big enough to take the dinghy up so we formulated a plan. I would take the dinghy up the creek with the 2 five gallon gas cans we had bought. Then I would run up and fill the cans drag them back to the boat and repeat as often as necessary until we were full. I called the gas station up only to find out that they did not have diesel. I asked where the nearest station was with diesel and found out that it I would have to walk over a half mile to fuel up and at 40 pounds per 5 gallon jug this no longer seemed like a good strategy. We looked at the Garmin and it showed a facility just a little way up a river/channel that had diesel so we called them on the phone. They told us that they we should go under 2 highway bridges that had 75 foot clearance and past the railroad lift bridge and they were immediately on the right.
We went up the channel past huge boat building and repair facilities, one was building a riverboat casino. We passed under the 2 highway bridges, approached the railroad bridge and called for an opening. After several calls and almost 10 minutes we got a reply that they would open soon. Fifteen minutes later the turnstile bridge opened and we went on thru looking for the fuel dock that was supposed to be immediately on the right. We were told that the facility had big red tanks and we should tie up right in front of them to fuel up. We kept looking for them and went down almost a ¼ mile and turned back still not seeing any sign of the red tanks. There was a facility with orange and white tanks but there was no sign of any kind of fuel pumps so we called them up again. I asked if they were past the 2 highway bridges and the railroad turnstile bridge. They said the railroad bridge was a draw bridge not a turnstile bridge and that I was about 8 miles away from where they were.
We looked at the map and realized they were up a river that we were not going on so we decided to continue on and take our chances. After another irritatingly looonng wait for the return trip through the railroad turnstile we were on our way. A few miles up the ICW I spotted what looked like a fuel facility and had Julie look them up online and call to ask if they would let us fuel up. A few minutes later we pulled up at Martin Midstream Fuel Services with a 25 mph wind on our nose. They were great people and set us up with fuel for the boat and gave us two 5 gallon sealed buckets to put additional fuel in. The guy pumping our fuel said the 2nd shift operator wouldn’t have let us fuel up, the facility was primarily for tugs that take on ~ 10,000 gallons which lasts them a week. Julie went in the office to pay for the diesel and came out with a dozen or so oranges that one of the employees had brought in to give away from trees in his yard. He offered a second bag, but how many oranges could 2 people eat. What a mistake not taking them was, they were the best oranges that I have ever eaten. After we shoved off I found out that we were charged the standard rate for the diesel which was $1.57 per gallon. This was about 1/3rd the price of what we had paid earlier in our trip at some marinas so we felt pretty good.
We continued west on the GIWW past huge shipyards and docking facilities. We tried to figure out what was in the barges that were being pushed to and fro. While many of them were not labeled of the ones that were a large number of them had all sorts of warnings about flammability, carcinogen, etc.. and the word BENZENE in large letters.
Benzene is a petrochemical product and had early uses such as making the original decaffeinated coffee Sanka, but today is mainly used as an intermediate to make other chemicals. Its most widely-produced derivatives include styrene, which is used to make polymers and plastics, phenol for resins and adhesives and nylon,. Smaller amounts of benzene are used to make some types of rubbers, lubricants, dyes, detergents, drugs, explosives, napalm and pesticides. See Wikipedia for more information which is where I stole this from.Near the end of the day we passed a tug that we had been following for a few hours thru a twisty part of the GIWW. The name of the tug was R.L. Guidry and the captain was having a lot of problems with the wind. He was pushing 6 empty barges and we had heard “This is the R.L. Guidry pushing 6 empties” can you hold up for me around this corner or see me on the “2’s” I’m having a hard time keeping my bow up in this wind, along with other requests for “leeway” throughout the afternoon. This request was given in a slow southern Louisiana drawl that was a lot John Wayne with a very deep voice. The rest of the tug captains were courteous but there was a hint of something in their voices that made me think that the captain of the R.L. Guidry was being a little overcautious.
We chose to request to pass on a stretch of the channel that was remarkably straight and he came back that he would see us on our 1 whistle. Being neophytes on the canal we asked if we should pass him on his port (left) side he came back sounding a little harried that we should pass him on his starboard (right) side to our port side. Talking to Julie about his demeanor she mentioned that she had overheard him talking to another skipper that he had been pushing 6 empties since 6:00 am and he had had a long day. We started the snail race to pass him and twelve minutes later we were done. We were now doing almost 7 knots instead of the 5 ½ we had been doing and were eagerly looking for a place to anchor for the night.
About 45 minutes later we found a nice small bay on the Garmin that appeared to be reasonably deep where we anchor for the night. It was in a zig or maybe a zag where the channel shifted it’s course for about 100 yards and had some taller trees that blocked the wind to some extent.
We motored past and then back upstream near the mouth of this small bay that was about 300 feet long on the channel and about 100 feet deep. We looked at the depth and figured out that we could make it in to anchor and not get too stuck. We pushed up into the east end of the anchorage and dropped our big anchor and backed up about 100 feet and set the anchor. We were getting ready to drop the dinghy and take the small anchor off of the stern about 100 feet to keep the boat in line when the R.L. Guidry came around the corner.
The captain contacted us on the radio and told us that he didn’t want to tell us what to do but he wouldn’t anchor where we had just anchored. Julie got on the radio and asked him for more information and he told us that barges coming around the corner in this wind could “wipe up” into the corner and hit us, especially in this wind. He told us that there was a boat dock about a mile up the canal and if we followed him he would point it out for us. We pulled the anchor quickly and within a few minutes we were right behind him again. As he said, about a mile further, he pointed out a boat dock to the right, just this side of a highway bridge. The boat dock was more of a launch ramp for runabouts and we ran aground pretty hard with our tail sticking out 30 feet into the canal.
With a little effort we backed out and went on a hunt for another anchorage. Julie had been driving for the last half hour, something she hadn’t done for most of the day because she had woken up with the flu was running a fever. Earlier in the day she had wanted to stop but I told her that I would drive and told her to go below and sleep. Julie didn’t want to leave me alone so she brought a sleeping bag and a couple of blankets up in the cockpit and slept on and off.
We headed up the channel slowly looking for places to spend the night. The first place that presented itself was a barge dock for the chemical plant that was just past the bridge. We had berthed next to tugs in the past and thought that this might be an option until we saw the ominous don’t park here signs that were posted all over the place. A little further up the canal there was a small cove, about 120 feet across and 50 feet deep that was incredibly sheltered but surrounded by huge Cypress trees and rock, it looked a little difficult to berth in. This would not be an anchorage but a tie off between 2 trees from the bow and stern. We decided to move on.
We pored over the Garmin looking for a place to stay and there were a couple of possible choice up the canal on the left side so we motored to see what there was to see. The first place we looked at was in someone’s back yard and it didn’t look too comfortable, strains of Dueling Banjo’s from Deliverance came to mind. The rifle fire that could be heard from beyond the trees confirmed this. The second potential anchorage was nothing but a dimple on the side of the road so we decided to turn back to the wooded, rocky cove that was just past the bridge.
Since we weren’t anchoring but tying up between trees instead I went forward to untie the anchor lines from the anchors. The plan was to nose the boat slowly into the cove, then I would hop into the dinghy and run lines from the bow and the stern to string us between the two shores out of the way of barge traffic.
We were about 100 yards from the anchorage about 45 feet from the shore motoring along when suddenly the boat turned towards the shore. Within a second or two we were pointed towards the shore at a 45 degree angle and the engine died. I was forward and not fully aware of what was going on but when I came back to the cockpit I asked Julie why the engine wasn’t running. She told me that the engine had suddenly died I told her to start it again and that she said that she had restarted it twice but it died every time she put it in gear.
I wasn’t aware of what was going on and was unable to process what Julie was saying (again) so I started the engine myself and put it in forward gear and it died instantly. I started the engine again and put it in reverse, it did not die but the engine lugged down and would not throttle up.
I realized that we could not move under our own power and was immediately concerned about drifting out into barge traffic.
The GIWW was probable 250 feet wide here and barges could be tied up 2 wide at 70 feet wide and with 2 passing each other going opposite directions with a little space in between them could take up most of the canal especially with the windy conditions. My immediate concern was that we would drift back out into the channel so we dropped the dinghy into the water and I rowed it to shore with the anchor line that I had just untied, the bitter end still tethered in the chain locker.
Not that the line was angry or at the end of it’s rope (that was supposed to be funny) but the bitter end is defined as “The part of a rope that is tied off”. The Bitter End is also an amazing resort on the Island of Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands.
I took the free end of the anchor line and rowed up to one of the cypress trees that lined the bank and attempted to tie the line around it. There were a couple of problems with this: the first being the girth of the tree, the second being the depth of the water.
The cypress trees along the shore were about 80 feet tall and the trunks started to fatten up just above the water and quickly turned into horizontal roots that lay out just below the water where I was paddling.
I had to use my paddle to push down on a mass of roots to shove the dinghy over a root coming off of the tree I wanted to tie up to. This in itself took a couple of minutes, which seemed like an eternity as I was afraid of the boat drifting back out into the canal in the middle of barge traffic. I finally got the nose of the dinghy about a foot from the tree and grabbed about 5 feet of the anchor line and tried to whip it around the tree so that the end would come around enough so that I could grab it. On the 3rd try I was able to lean forward off of the front of the boat and only get a little wet as I retrieved the end of the line. I tied the bow of the boat off on the cypress tree and ran another line off of the stern to another tree and a 3rd line from the middle of the boat to even another tree. We spent the next 10 minutes or so trying to get the boat closer to shore, taking the lines that we had tied to the trees on shore to the winches in an attempt to get the boat closer to shore, but it wouldn’t move.
Cypress SwampWith the tying up all done, Julie broke down and was almost hysterical about breaking the boat.
As I mentioned before, she was running a fever all day and had talked about stopping early in the afternoon, she had slept in the cockpit (anyone else ever wonder where that name came form) most of the day but was still very sick and tired. I tried to console her, telling her that this was a freak accident. After all, who would have expected to hit a completely submerged tree while motoring 45 feet from the shore? Eventually she calmed down. A little later when I was able to sneak off, I went below and proceed with a silent four letter word tirade about our present predicament. With that out of my system I felt much better about addressing the current situation. I had seen these symptoms before, we had a piece of line wrapped around the propeller shaft that was knotted so tight that it was killing the engine whenever we put it in gear. The cure was simple, jump into the 48 degree water, cut the rope away and goes on our merry way. I put on my leaky dry suit and climbed down the ladder into the incredibly dark murky water and swam to the back of the boat. Julie was waiting there for me as was one of the dock lines that was cleated off, hanging in the water that I would use as a tether.
The propeller is about 3 ½ feet below the water, so I not so bravely grabbed the rudder and pulled myself down and grabbed the prop. I found the shaft and as I suspected it was wrapped with some sort of line. It felt like polypropylene (ski line) and I started pulling it away. Because of the cold I couldn’t stay down very long and I quickly came back up and got a knife from Julie.
I dropped back down under the water and started hacking at the rope around the shaft but something didn’t seem quite right. I had cut rope off of prop shafts many, many years ago and there was a different feel to it. I came back up, gave the knife back to Julie and dove back to investigate. I grabbed the rope around the shaft and started tearing at it with my fingers. It started coming off in ribbons and felt nothing like rope. I came back up to the surface, looked in my hands and realized that I had strands of tree bark in my hands. I looked up to tell Julie what I had found and she was not there. I was terrified. I was so cold and weak at this point that not seeing her when my head came out of the water completely freaked me out. I called out for her and within seconds her beautiful face was looking down at me. I implored her to always be there when I came up, the water was so cold and incredibly dark I was not comfortable at all, as a matter of fact I was frightened.
While I was talking to her my right foot hit something in the water a couple of feet behind the rudder and about 4 feet down. I moved my feet around found what felt like a pole sticking straight back about 4 feet below the water. I dove down and using my hands in the inky black water realized that the pole was in fact a tree trunk about 6 or 7 inches in diameter, that would help to explain the bark wrapped around the shaft. I came back up to the surface and suddenly had a strong suspicion about why the engine died each time we put it in gear.
I dove back down, found the propeller and used my hands to trace the outline of the 4 blades of the prop. I made it thru 3 of the blades and finally to the 4th when I encountered the same tree trunk that I had just been standing on. The blade of the propeller was buried almost 2 inches into the tree trunk and appeared to be slightly bent. I surfaced and went to the boat, found the tree with my feet, put my hands under the bottom of the boat, stuck my head under water again to get better leverage and tried to break the tree away from the prop. I have always had strong legs, I wrestled 119 pounds my senior year in high school and could leg press 375 pounds. If that same strength to weight ratio held up I should be able to leg press close to 600 pounds. Of course we do tend to fade over time but I was still trying like hell.
A few minutes later I was in the boat, soaked to the bone and shaking uncontrollably and we were still stuck solidly to the tree. Julie helped dry me off and get me dressed in sweats and laid against me for a few minutes to get me to stop shaking………….. I really hate being this cold.
A little while later all was well except for the fact that we were sitting there with our propeller stuck into a submerged cypress tree on the ICW with barge traffic going past us. So we did what anyone else would do, we turned on all of our lights, hung lanterns on the back of the boat and got on the radio to alert tugs of our situation.
Actually
we did not get on the radio, Julie got on the radio. She was feeling a little better now and as we mentioned before, these guys would much rather listen to a woman than a man especially when it was something like this. She would occasionally hail a passing tug to explain our situation and ask if they new of any locals that could pull us off. She also asked for the tug captains to pass the word up and down the river that we were stuck here and to keep an eye open for us. None of the captains knew of anyone that could pull us off and they all wished us luck and said that they would pass the word about us stuck and sticking out into the channel, all except for one. Some old fart came back on the radio, after Julie explained that we were stuck on a tree, and repeatedly told us that we had picked a really bad place to park. Julie tried again to explain the situation but the opinionated old fart didn’t want to hear anything but his opinion. As I write this I wonder if I am becoming an opinionated old fart,. Obviously the answer is no, and obviously I don’t care what you think.
We spent the night on the side of the “highway” with the radio on sleeping a little at a time, talking to tugs occasionally about our plight. Most of the tugs apparently had heard that we were stuck there and slowed down when they came closer. I thought of how much fuel we were wasting with these tugs slowing down and speeding up for us and felt guilty. With this thought in mind I decided that we need to be a little more considerate the next time we get stuck. The barge traffic died down a little after 4:00 am, I turned the radio off, and we actually slept for 2 hours.
About 6:30 we got up and were trying to evaluate the situation with fresh yet sleepy eyes to see if there was some way we could get unstuck. I wasn’t getting in the water again; if I had a scuba tank and a real dry suit I could have dove down and used a saw to extract the propeller from the tree, but I had neither.
We were standing on deck, Julie still sick, trying to figure out what to do when an all aluminum power boat with twin outboards came by doing about 15 miles per hour. I tried to hail them on the radio by description, “Eastbound workboat passing the sailboat on the side of the cannel come in please.”, with no response. I then started waiving my hands at them but they kept going. They were about 200 feet past us when they throttled back to an idle and turned back towards us. When they got close to us a young guy ran to the bow of the boat and asked , “How you doing?” , I replied, not so good. He then asked, “do you all need help?” I said, “you bet”. Another guy in his mid 40’s that looked like a guy that I am sure I saw on a Louisiana Cooking show (Y’all remember Justin Wilson saying “add a little onion”, which sounded like onyon, “I guarantee.”
We talked about our situation and they said that they would pull us off. We scurried about and started removing the lines from the Cypress trees on shore and the kid on the work boat jumped into the John boat or as he called it “Joeboat” that they had on their fore deck (that would be the little flat front part of the deck of the boat in front of the little house part in the middle). He took off the bow line while we removed the stern and mid-ship line.
We took the bow line of our boat that had just been looped around a Cypress tree and handed it to the kid. He started to wrap the line around the cleat at the back of their boat when the older guy walked out of the boats cabin and said, “Don’t be tying any of your coonass knots now.”.
In case you don’t know what a coonass is, the following is from Wikipedia.
Coonass, or Coon-ass, is an epithet used in reference to a person of Cajun ethnicity. Although many Cajuns use the word in regard to themselves, other Cajuns view the term as an ethnic slur against the Cajun people, especially when used by non-Cajuns. Socioeconomic factors appear to influence how Cajuns are likely to view the term: working-class Cajuns tend to regard the word "coonass" as a badge of ethnic pride; whereas middle- and upper-class Cajuns are more likely to regard the term as insulting or degrading, even when used by fellow Cajuns in reference to themselves.The working class kid laughed and cleated the line off to their boat and said that we should get away from the front of the boat just in case the line snapped when they were pulling it. He waved at us and they both stepped back into the cabin of the work boat. They pulled the boat straight out from the shore slowly until it the line got tight and they stopped. They then started to throttle up until both 250 horsepower outboard engines were roaring and the boat was almost dancing on the water. After a minute of pulling their boat had drifted down river so they backed up the river and pulled again, this time aiming a little more upstream so the current wouldn’t affect them so much. The second time around ended up just like the first go around, only it took a little longer. On the 3rd try they headed even further upstream and started to throttle up when the fine yacht Second Star pulled away from the shore effortlessly. Both of the guys on the work boat came out of the cabin with confused looks on their faces, which probably mirrored the look on my face. Julie was the only one that wasn’t amazed and she said, “That explains the loud cracking noise I heard at the end of the last try.” Apparently the propeller had broken away from the tree it was stuck in when they had finished pulling the last time and we were already free when they tried the 3rd time.
They said that they would pull us back up to the boat ramp up stream and we told them that we had tried it the night before and ran aground. I told them that I wanted to try to motor on our own so they idled backwards as I collected our anchor line. When they threw the tail to me Julie throttled up a little bit and we started to move ever so slowly back up the river. She immediately slowed the boat down but even at 1,000 RPM ,which was almost idle speed, the rear end of the boat was moving around like a washing machine on spin cycle with a bunch of towels clumped up on one side. We looked up and the top of the mast was also tracing 3 foot diameter circles in the sky. Something was definitely amok and we were pretty sure it was the propeller.
The boat was unwieldy but we slowly headed up the canal. The guys on the work boat stuck around and asked what we planned to do. I told them that I thought that the cut out next to the bridge across from the boat launch looked kind of promising but I wasn’t sure how deep it was.
They said that they would find out and shot over there and ran aground near the opening with their 1 foot draft. They then took it upon themselves to find us a place that was deep enough.
After a few minutes they came back and told us that the canal was pretty deep against the bridge abutment on the downstream side from the boat launch. We went up river, spun around and slowly motored over towards the abutment which was at a 45 degree angle to the main channel. We were surprised to find that it was so deep there that when we finally tied up the back of the boat only stuck out into the channel few inches. The weird part was that if you jumped off of the front of the boat you would most likely break your ankles on the large flat rocks that were there.
Our buddies on the work boat had helped us get docked and said that they would check with us later in the day when they got done with their rounds. We found out later that they worked for ConocoPhillips Oil and did a daily checkup of a handful of oil rigs that were out on some of the shallow lakes and bays in the area. These rigs were fully automated but they would check on them regularly to do some of the checkups and maintenance that still required human beings.
We looked on the internet and called around looking for divers with no luck. We then tried dive shops but they didn’t get into the commercial part of the business. We next tried a propeller repair shop and they suggested a guy and gave us his phone number. We called him and he said he would pull our prop and come back to reinstall it for $1,000 but he didn’t take checks or credit cards, cash only. Now this was an issue, we usually had a couple hundred bucks stashed away on the boat for minor emergencies but were down to about $80 after our last fuel stop and a dinner. Our debit card would only allot $300 per day which meant that it would take 4 days to come up with the cash our “buddy” wanted.
Later that day our work boat buddies showed up again after making their rounds on the local oil rigs and asked how we were doing. We told them about our problems with the diver we found and they said that they would look into it for us. The next morning thy stopped by with a phone number of another diver that might be a little less expensive and a little more flexible with respect to payment terms. We thanked them and called the diver they recommended. This diver was only going to charge us $875.00, unless it was real easy, and would take a check. So we set up a time to have them come by and pull the propeller. One of his divers was a young guy that was going to school to be a helicopter pilot and would be passing by in the morning to go to school and coming back in the afternoon. He was to pull our prop in the morning, we would get it fixed during the day and he would reinstall it that afternoon.
We called our good buddies at Enterprise car rental and told them that we needed to be picked up and that we were under the Bayou Salee bridge. They came back and asked if we were near to the bridge and we said no, we were under the bridge, next to the boat ramp and they said that they would send someone out to pick us up. An hour later I was standing under the bridge when a new Ford F150 pickup pulled up and I hopped in. The driver was a young black guy who drove me back to Franklin LA and the car rental office. On the way there, I asked him what the strange stalk-like crops where growing in the fields that we passed, he replied that they where sugar cane. (It worked out that Julie returned the car a couple of days later and the same young guy dropped her off at the boat. He asked her where I was from because I didn’t even know what sugar cane looked like.)
Did I mention that it was cold again? It was mid December in southern Louisiana and despite what it should be, it was cold. Seems while we were tied to a bridge abutment on the side of the ICW/GIWW they had snow for
the first time in 20 years. All the tugs and people we came in contact with were all excited about it. Of course they had heaters and furnaces and stuff like that that kept you warm. All we could do was add layers of clothing and huddle around our little 6” heater to try to keep warm, then we ran out of propane and it got really cold.
After I picked up the car I went to a grocery store to pick up dinner and then to Wal-Mart and bought up their entire stock of 1 pound canisters of propane gas for our heater, a grand total of 12 cans.
Everybody gets extra layers!The next morning came and went and no one showed up to take off our prop. After a handful of calls we finally got in touch with the owner of the company and found out that our guy wasn’t going to show up until that afternoon. I kept kicking myself (figuratively speaking) because I could remove the prop myself if I had a dry suit, tank and associated gear and of course a divers certificate and it would cost only a little more than I was going to pay to have them remove the prop. But I didn’t so I was stuck, literally.
The diver showed up late in the afternoon and walked over to survey the situation. I explained what was what and he went back to his pickup to change into his dive gear. We both walked down the embankment next to the bridge and I got into the dinghy while he walked into the water near the bow of the boat and swam back to the stern to evaluate the situation.
I sat in the dinghy watching his bubbles and occasionally talking to him and handed him wrenches and other tools to free the propeller. 15 minutes later we were heading back to shore and I had the prop in the dinghy with me. It was late in the day and the local repair propeller place that Julie had talked to the day before was closed so we settled in for another frigid night in Southern Louisiana. The next morning Julie called the prop shop. YOU TELL THE STORY HERE BABE.
I spoke with a very nice guy names Joel and explained that we had hit a tree and our prop was bent so I felt that we would need a new one. He said that would be expensive and that they could us a rosebud torch and hammers to repair ours. He wanted to confirm the size of our wheel. Now I was a little confused. What did it matter how big the wheel was, it was our prop that was bent. After a little Laurel and Hardyesque exchange Joel slowly explained, so that any five year old could understand, that there are 3 types of propulsion systems for vessels “A little boat like ours has a propeller, a bigger boat like a tug boat has a wheel, and a really big boat has screws”. They would be happy to fix our propeller. I asked him what it would cost and would he take a check or credit, after the divers I was feeling a little vulnerable to being taken. He said “don’t your worry miss Julie we’ll fix you up and there won’t be any charge”. I jumped into the rental car and drove the 30 miles to the prop shop. It was amazing to see the guys with torches heating huge 4 foot diameter wheels and using two sledge hammers against each other top and bottom on the metal to pound them back into shape. By comparison they used a Bic lighter and tack hammer to fix ours. 2 hours and a gift of a large box of donuts later they were done.
Houston I think we have a proplem.I have to say that despite the awful circumstance of this particular week the hospitality and genuine concern shown by the guys from Conoco and Joel at the prop shop made this bearable. Our friends that pulled us off of the tree checked on us twice a day. It was 28 degrees and they new that we had very little heat and wanted to make sure we were ok. They brought a huge container of the best home made gumbo I have ever eaten and picked us up on the 3rd night and took us back to the house that they live in all week so that we could shower. It turns out that southern hospitality isn’t dead it’s just well hidden. BACK TO YOU
The next day we found out that our young diver buddy was off in the Gulf looking for a helicopter that had crashed with 3 men on board, which seemed a little ironic since he was going to school to be a helicopter pilot. We wondered how he felt about diving for members of the profession that he hoping to join but then realized that helicopter pilots probably had better survival rate than divers and made more money.
Later that day the owner of the company came by and installed the prop despite the fact that our fearless mutt, Ziggy tried to scale the bridge abutment to attack him when he showed up without warning and yelled down to us. Ziggy had jumped off of the boat on to the timber wall and I had to pull him off of the wall before he fell back into the canal. As bad as this was, he really freaked out when our diver showed up again wearing his dry suit, tank and hood looking like the creature from the black lagoon. When the diver dropped into the water I got on the radio and told the closest tug who and where we were and that we had a diver in the water replacing our wheel. He came back and said that he would alert all other vessels in the area. The installation took 15 minutes and 2 tugs passed by at the slowest speed I had seen on the canal. When he was out I told the nearest tug and it was business as usual.
We were ready to go but it was late afternoon and it was a long day to the next possible anchorage so we decided to spend another night tied to the Bayou Salee bridge, we would leave before dawn the next morning.
