Thursday, Nov. 22 – Monday, November 26, 2018
Locking time-lapse videos
For anyone interested in time-lapse videos about entering a lock or descending in a lock, Brian has figured out how take the video and put it on Youtube. The links are below – we hope it works. If you have trouble with it, please let us know so we can try to get it to work correctly.
Entering a lock: https://youtu.be/NC6N6LPoVa8
Descending in a lock: https://youtu.be/zfgjwxFwrFQ
When we met the office manager at Dog River Marina, she asked where we were from. As usual, we described being from a Chicago suburb but actually being closer to Wisconsin than Chicago. She asked which suburb and to our surprise, she not only knew of Mundelein, but had worked there some years ago! She spent one week per month there while living in Indiana and working for an animal pharmaceutical company that had labs in Mundelein. Wow – it’s a small world after all! (Uh-oh – now you’ll have that song in your head if you’ve ever been to Disney World!)
While waiting for our refrigerator, we decided to do a little sight-seeing.
We visited the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park in Mobile on Thanksgiving Day since we had our big feast on Wednesday. For the first time ever, we were given the "senior discount" because she asked if we were 55 or over. (That feels a little strange... 1-Being asked if you are 55 or over, and 2-Being able to say yes!) The USS Alabama is a WWII battleship. The self-guided tour lets you walk through the entire ship. We went down several levels - all the way to the engine room, and up 8 levels above the deck - very impressive! The battleship was commissioned in August 1942 and decommissioned in January, 1947. It was involved in the battle that took Saipan and Tinian Islands from the Japanese. Brian’s Uncle Ray was B-29 pilot and flew his plane (Tinian Ann) from the base on Tinian to bomb Japan during the war. It was interesting to see that the USS Alabama got one of its battle awards supporting the invasion of Tinian. The park also has a WWII submarine, the USS Drum, and visitors are allowed to walk through it as well. No directions needed - much easier to find your way around – straight and narrow! 😁 There is also an Aircraft Pavilion, plus numerous aircraft, tanks and other exhibits around the grounds. It is well worth a visit if you are ever in the area.
On the other side of Mobile Bay, the city of Fairhope provided a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. We’d planned on going there by boat, but since we have a rental car and it’s only a 40 minute drive, we were able to visit this quaint town by day-trip. (This will allow us to go straight to the following stop on our itinerary … when we finally get to travel again!) The town is very similar to the resort towns along the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. We had a delicious lunch while sitting outside at Pinzone’s Italian Restaurant, then did the tourist walk through the main streets of the town.
We’ve had a couple of visitors this past week. Sue’s cousin, John, met us for a late lunch at Callaghan’s in Mobile while on his drive back to Mandeville, LA from the Atlanta area. It was great to see him and spend several hours catching up and chatting about childhood memories. We all came back to the boat for little more reminiscing until John had to get on his way for the last 2 hours of his drive home.
Our other visitor was feline…. It was getting close to high tide one night when a cat followed Brian back to the boat. Brian was quick enough to get on and close the door before the cat made it onto the sundeck, but it did hop up onto the side walkway. Of course it was adorable, and obviously well cared for - no fight marks, scratches or nipped ears. After making a couple of trips across the front of the boat while padding quietly back and forth between starboard and port sundeck doors, the cat finally figured he wasn’t getting any handouts and moved on to more accommodating boaters. Fortunately during all this time, the blinds were drawn and the windshield cover was on, so Bo was able to continue snoozing in his favorite position on the couch (actually any position on the couch is a favorite of his) instead of seeing it and barking like crazy!
Did we mention high tide? Tides are a new experience for us. This week, we’ve been subjected to some very high tides, that is high tides for us … we are used to Lake Michigan.
…the Great Lakes spring tide, the largest tides caused by the combined forces of the sun and moon, is less than five centimeters [2 inches] in height. These minor variations are masked by the greater fluctuations in lake levels produced by wind and barometric pressure changes. Consequently, the Great Lakes are considered to be non-tidal. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/gltides.html
High tide here causes the marina parking lot to flood, the work sheds have water running through them (now we understand why the vending machines are up on blocks) and no one blinks an eye about it. One fellow has his sailboat hauled-out, so it is on jack-stands. He also has three dinghies (why 3? - why not!). One was not tied to the jack-stands so it floated away on the high tide and he had to track it down in the local swamp the next morning. Right now, the high tides are during the night so we've been moving the rental car to higher ground around 10 pm to make sure the water doesn't get in through the bottom of the doors – or do they make really good water-tight high-tide door seals in the south? The boat rose high enough off the dock that Bo wouldn’t jump down to the dock, much less have any chance of jumping back up onto the boat. Brian had to move the fish cockpit cooler (used for storage of lines, and part of Bo’s descent platform system from sundeck to fish cockpit) onto the dock next to the boat so Bo (and we) could get on & off the boat! Many marinas up north and along the rivers have floating docks that go up and down with the height of the water as it changes. Since we’ve been farther south, most the docks appear to be solidly set and don’t float up and down with the tide. Here, we’ve been able to step from boat to dock at the same level at low tide, then it can go so high that a step ladder (or cooler) is mandatory. We know the tides will become more extreme as we continue on our trip… there’s always more fun to look forward to!