Orange to Intercoastal City

October 25 Leaving Orange
Lizzy, Hannahs friend from Orange, came down to see us off, Davids windless worked perfectly, as I would expect from a master electrician.  We passed Honeywell early in the morning, and called Mrs Rachael to say hello to the Honeywell clan.  Planning to go to Bayou Lacassine tongiht, we had to wait about an hour for the Ellender lift bridge where another boat the Texas Dreamer, a 37' cat, was waiting too.  One of the two of us managed to get cussed out by a couple of barges. 

We started to try to anchor at Bayou Choupique, but it was blowing about 25, and if we had gone aground, we would not have been able to recover from it.  So we pressed on, following Texas Dreamer throught the lockes and bridges.  We tried Bayou Lacassine, same story as the last one, too shallow.  The sun went down, and I do not ever remember so much darkness.  We could not see past the bow, all we could do is look at the sides of the ditch and hope there was nothing in front of us.  We motored on, finding our way into the Choupique River where we anchored in total darkness.  About a half an hour later, the moon came up. It was quite nice even though it was still blowing over 20 knots.

October 26  On to Intercoastal City
I last checked the achor at about 4 am, and everything was fine, but we were aground in the morning.  I think it was a tide thing because we were in the same place as before from all of our bearings we took the night before.  The day was extremely windy again, but pretty uneventful.  Made it to Shell Morgan landing and fueled up.  Managed to dock on the windward finger to get fuel and moved around and dock on the leward side, with a 25 knot cross wind, without a scrach.  AAAAAHHHHH AC, power.  Changed the oil and the fuel filter, and a great night with AC.

October 22-23 Morgan City

Had our first rain of the trip over night in Morgan City.. it cleaned up the boat well, and the temperature dropped like a rock.  We did some chores, laundry, etc.



Sorry for the lack of postings.  Internet has been scattered, and we are still working through problems.  We just figured out how to compress our photos, so we'll be adding more soon. 

Houston to New Orleans

October 14 -17 The preparation on the boat

Lots to do on the boat over the next few days. Got the boat bottom cleaned, worked on the AC unit for the main salon, it did not seem to be working, turned out to be a temperature indicator.  Got diesel for the backup tanks.  Installed a new AGM house battery, AGM stands for a Grand Mortgage, relating to its cost. 

Installed virus software for the main computer, which later turned out to have caused failure of our remote internet connection, which is why we have not been able to communicate over the start of our journey. 

October 20  The Dream Begins

Left Waterford marina about 9 am under beautiful conditions, all of the other cruisers came out to wish us off, along with my parents who took the picture.  We went through the narrow channel towards the lake where we met a large offshore power boat, who entered another channel allowing us to pass and then back up and entered the Waterford channel, very courteous.  Very little traffic on the ship channel compared to what we have seen.  The plan was to get to Stieves landing, an early stop, but we could not enter the harbor due to our draft of 6 feet, we motored on… the same story there.  We then called a bait store whose number we got from a sign on the ICW.  The very helpful owner directed us to the next marina which again was too shallow for us; however, another helpful gentleman directed us to a narrow cut between the intercostals and the bay, where it was about 12 feet deep, the only problem was that this was the main channel that fishermen used to get back and forth, we heard several swear words over outboards, but all in all a reasonable place to anchor.

October 21  On to Taylor’s Bayou

Started off about 7 am, all in all a mundane day, a few barges on the waterway, a few cows along the shoreline, then a great place to anchor, the girls had a day of school, and Hannah began designing our home for when we get back, I think they miss the space of our former home.

October 22 Bridge city and Orange

Since the trip is relatively short from Taylor’s Bayou we started off a little later, about 8:30.  I thought there would be a lot of traffic in the ship channel, turns out we only passed one ship, but it was a little creepy.  The wind was such that the ship, and the barges, were skewed so that we passed port to port it appeared as though we were going to be run over, but no real issues,  We passed through the Cow Bayou bridge about 1 with our friends house the Fults’s in mind.  As we tried to enter the cut the depth meter said no, and we had to resort to plan B.  We med moored to one of the homes bulkhead in the main channel, the anchor drug little at first, but it appears to be a good spot.  David Fults then drove me to the gas station to replace the diesel we had burned.  Several of my coworkers joined us in the evening and Ron even bought the girls, and us, pizza.  Thanks Ron! 

Moving Days

October 10^th The fun begins

We had spent the bigger part of six months packing and moving, so we did not think there was a lot left to do.  The house looked baron, and we had filled about 1/3 of our storage units with stuff, a 4 bedroom house is supposed to fit into one.  We began our final pack at about 6am and did not stop until 9pm, and it was just looking worse than it did.  Where did all of this stuff come from?  I took about 4 pickup loads to the storage, and it did not even put a dent in it.  I thought we might need some more boxes, so Michelle ran up to Uhaul and got there when they were leaving for the day, a near miss, we sure needed them.  Chicken from Popeye’s for dinner, they cooked it fresh for us.   We went to sleep exhausted.

October 11^th The Fun Continues; Another Day of Packing

We had loaded everything and took about 4 truck loads of garbage to the dumpster at the mini storage place.  Got the truck into the outside storage and loaded it up with outside stuff.   It fit and we were feeling ok, considering another 15 hour day. 

October 12^th Moving day

Up at 6 today, and went straight to work, packing, packing and more packing.  The movers from A1 showed up about 9, and they started loading.  Michelle went to find blankets to put in between the furniture once they started loading it into the unit.  It was not looking good when the movers began to pack the truck, so I called Michelle and asked her to stop at the mini storage and get another 10/10, there was one more available she drove home, about 2 minutes and looked at the truck and said, “your right, we need to get it.  She called the storage and someone had come in and rented it already, within 5 minutes! Had to go to plan B, we rented another outside storage area, and had to sort everything we had been putting into storage for the past 6 months into outside non climate controlled or inside climate controlled.  We got the truck back out, reinsured it, and started loading that unit with the stuff that could stand the heat.  By about 2:30 the movers were done, but we were not, a couple more trips to the mini storage.  Emily slept in the middle of the living room floor that night, and we had the only bed in the house.

October 12^th, Cleaning day

Up at five, and started cleaning after a couple of cups of coffee.  Start with the garage and go from there.  It does not look like a lot when there is nothing in the house, but it is.  Touch up all the nail holes, clean the base boards and scrub everything. The carpet people got to the house at about 11, we just kept cleaning: By the end of the day we were sore and exhausted, we left for the boat about 6:30.  We unloaded only what was really needed from the van and sat in the cockpit with a nice cocktail and a glass of wine and told each other how much we hurt.

Putting the last stuff on the boat ONE week to go in the house

We unloaded the last of the items we plan to bring along on to the boat this weekend, including our fold up bikes.  They didn't take as much room as either Michelle or I had thought, so we do still have some room on the deck.  The plan is to leave in about 3 weeks.  We are hoping to get to the Keys by Christmas.  Maybe stay for a little while there. 

A friend of mine at work gave us a parting gift last week of a Mai Tai's recipe and Yahtzee, along with some very nice hand towels for the galley.  We spent a good part of the day getting a few things around, and then headed over to the pool for an end of season swim.