Headwinds of all kinds

It's Thursday morning, Alison is still peacefully sleeping and I'm listening to Jimmy Buffett songs on Spotify, sipping tea and eating homemade oatmeal raisin cookies (I made a batch since I ran out of the cookies Angie gave me).  Sleeping hasn't always been easy on this trip for her, especially when we're hanging on an anchor and not safely tied up in a marina. Thank goodness she was awake on our "Dark and Stormy Night."  We've been travelling on the river for two weeks.  I had hoped to be in Mobile within three weeks, but all the delays with engine problems has kept us at marinas way too many nights and days.  It consumed time and more money than we can afford.  I thought I'd write down a few thoughts at this stage of our trip.

It seems like everything has conspired to make this trip difficult.  We had all sorts of delays and problems threatening to keep us from casting off the dock lines. Only sheer determination and dogged persistence against all obstacles made it possible to leave. Then, up until day before yesterday, the winds have been determinedly against me the entire trip.  If I wanted to go south, the wind blew hard from the south.  When the river turned north, the wind blew hard from the north. On a single day, the river turned south, then west, then north and the wind followed me and blew against me all day.  And I mean blew hard!  On a calm day the boat can get about 7 mph at 80% throttle.  Against these winds I could only make 5-6 mph, sometime as little as 3-4!  The headwinds produced a choppy lake, stirring up the debris in my fuel tank and causing the engine to fail.  Again, only dogged persistence against contrary winds made it possible to make any progress at all.

But on Tuesday, the winds were behind us for the first time.    I put up the jib sail and we positively flew downriver at a blazing 8 mph!  It was wonderful after the cold and wind we had been fighting against.  Finally near Florence Alabama, I had been making great time and was almost ready to enter  Wilson lock when once again, the motor coughed and stopped just as I was preparing to enter the lock.  Again-very bad timing!  I saw on a mapping program on the Ipad that there was a marina nearby, so I turned toward that inlet and called the marina to announce my arrival and to ask for help. I was determined to find someone that knew about diesels to help me fix this problem once and for all!  I was under sail in the open lake, but would need the motor to get up the narrow channel to the marina.  As I approached the channel, I tried the motor again and it worked, but it only got me half way to the marina before it coughed out again.  I was left drifting between houses and private docks, being blown back out toward the lake.  There wasn't enough room to sail and, as always, the wind was coming directly from the direction I wanted to go.  I called the marina and asked if they could come tow me in and they said the'd be there soon.  That makes four times I've been towed on this trip!  The first was from being aground, but the other three were from engine problems.  I managed to catch hold of a private dock and tied onto it while waiting for the tow.

A few minutes later, Jeff Wilcoxson of J's Landing marina pulled up and towed Happytat to the dock.  We discussed the engine's history and I suggested that the strainer in the tank must be stopping up.  He agreed and gave me several great suggestions to fix the problem.   At his advice, I vacuumed out the bottom of the tank with a device that I carry to change the engine's oil.  I could see gunk and trash flowing through the tube and took out a total of 6 gallons of diesel before the tube started coming up clear.  Also at his advice, I shortened the dip tube and installed an auxiliary fuel tank with a selector switch, so that if the engine starts coughing again, I can switch to the spare tank with clean fuel without missing a beat.  It's a great comfort to look down at my selector switch and know that if I it had been there for me before, I would have had a lot less to write about in this blog.  So many thanks to Jeff at J's landing!  And he didn't charge me anything for the tow, advice and a loaner car to pick up parts!! On my insistence, he accepted $20 from me. The marina people we have met on this trip have all been wonderful.

The next stage is travelling through the Tenn-Tom, a partly man-made canal joining the Tennessee River, going through lots of very rural Mississippi countryside with few marinas or grocery stops on the way.  It's 450 miles long and if everything goes well, which it hasn't so far, it will take about 10 more days of river travelling  before we see salt water.  This has been a fun, but very tiring trip.  I've spent far too many hours with my head stuck in the engine with diesel fuel on my hands.  Alison has been worried too much of the time about our safety and it  hasn't been as much fun for her so far as I'd hoped.  When I'm not actually working on the boat, I'm tensely awaiting the next thing to go wrong.  Yesterday I bought two more replacement fuel filters for spares (another $100 gone), one of the lifelines needs repair parts, and the hatch above our bed dripped water on my pillow when it rained yesterday.  We used the marina courtesy car and went to Walmart yesterday to get some prescriptions filled.  In fact, our trip so far has been a series of Walmart visits in different cities.  Exotic, huh?

The next big challenge is to get the boat under at least 6 bridges with only a 52 foot clearance height.  My mast is 52 feet from the water, plus antenna and wind vane of another foot. I have practiced  heeling the boat over at Sale Creek by hanging my dinghy from halyards (ropes) and a big wide strap (thanks Tony) from the boom hung over the side of the boat, then filling it with water from a small pump.  The water gradually adds weight, heeling the boat over and thus lowering the mast.  It worked fine at the dock, but how will it work going under a real-life bridge?  Will the river current pull me faster than I want to go? Will the dinghy actually lower the mast enough? I learned yesterday that the river level is up from normal due to spring rains by one foot.  That means that my clearance is now only 51 feet! Now I have to heel the boat over at least two feet to clear.  I plan to heel it over 4 feet to be sure.  Today is practice day.  When it warms up a little, I plan to go out in the harbor and do some practicing with the dinghy.  If I am not confident in my ability to heel the boat over, I'll have the marina take my mast down and carry it on the boat till we get to Mobile where we'll have it raised back up again (another $500).

Wish us luck!
Larry and Alison
SV Happytat