Memsahib's Voyage

We were doing really well on Memsahibs’s March to the Sea.  Started witha a great grocery and dinner stop at tony Grand Haven Resort and a long run down the Tenn-Tom to a beautiful anchorage. Then we shifted into gear to enter a lock and nothing — no power forward or reverse, engine running fine. It was no fun looking in the bilge to see the prop shaft lying there totally disconnected from the engine.

A service company came out from Fulton, only to find that the bolts needed to hook it all back together were not easy to come by in Mississippi, since the shaft coupling came from Denmark. The diagnosis was easy as to what had happened, though, when we found all the nuts to the bolts lying in the bilge — the original bolts the installer used were too short and never hit the lock washers. So with the strain caused by the notorious jacket-on-shaft incident and 3,000 miles of cruising they simply rattled off.

So we had to be towed into Fulton and spent three days eating catfish at Midway Marina (great folks, great service) while bolts were eventually found from a European car dealer.  And we went to Walmart to buy hats and gloves because Mississippi is going through a cold wave. When we left yesterday we had to scrape the ice off the windshield with our pancake flipper.

The marinas down the Tenn-Tom are pretty rustic — kind of a combination of gas station, RV park and docks. The Tenn-Tom is pretty enough, but right now we just want to get home for Thanksgiving and down to the nice warm Gulf. We are leaving the boat in Demopolis for two weeks, so more from there next.

The Evidence

Mississippi Yachting Attire

Frost in the Sunny South

Not an easy gas dock

Anchorages like this make it all worthwhile