Southern Hospitality

At Dog River, our first order of business was to pick up the alternator that was shipped to one of the marine stores. This area is a popular stopover for boats going up and down the waterway or going  to and from Texas and Florida, so it is quite common to see megayachts tied up here. The atmosphere is not unlike that of Solomon Islands in Maryland, except that the latter has a town with lots of restaurants and marinas. We called in at Grand Mariner Marina. After we fueled up and settled into our slip, Barbara, the lady in charge, came over to give us her car keys and directions to the closest grocery store and Walmart.  We did our shopping and went to pick up the alternator. Lo and behold, it wasn't exactly the same as the original part. The side that hold the screws was a tad bigger, and the screws were different. It would require a machine shop to create a new bracket to hold the part, and then the belt might have to be longer. The captain decided to have a mechanic do it. The marina recommended Tom, who came by the next morning. He suggested keeping everything the same, so he spent all day looking for another alternator for us. By 5pm, he returned with a similar one with minor details that he could alter, but at least it is the same exact size. Next morning, he came to put it in. Come time to pay the bill, we were totally shocked. He only charged us for 1 hour of labor! For all that running around, and he even took Sophal to return the part we had ordered. Any other place, a mechanic would have charged us 3 hours, and we would have been willing to pay that too. Ahh, so this is what they call Southern hospitality...

River cruising is very different from coastal cruising. There is no salt spray so you don't feel sticky all the time, no rolling wave, no tides. There is current, but the water pool was normal, so it wasn't too bad. In fact it was so smooth that we found it boring, especially after 400 miles of the same scenery. After eight days on the waterway that twists and turns for miles, about the only traffic we encountered was the tow barges. Meeting them can be exciting as well as hairy, especially in tight S-turns. We learned to communicate with the tow captains. Most of the times, we understood them, but there were some with such heavy Southern drawl that we had no clue what they were saying. Then there were the locks. The waterway was built for commercial use, so the tows have priority over pleasure boats in the locks. Going through the first one, a tow was waiting to get in. Unfortunately, something had gone awry with the steerage, so he told the lockmaster to go ahead and let us go through first. Our second one wasn't so lucky. We had to wait for a tow to get out of the lock, and he was stuck in there forever. After the 3rd lock, we had the system down packed, and locking was a breeze. 

Along the way, we would meet the same boats over and over again in different anchoarges - Boat Doc, Maha Rani and Dorian. Finally all four boats ended up at Midway Marina. Except for Dorian, we all met up for dinner one night and had our Fried Catfish at the restaurant in the marina. Their stories are quite interesting. Boat Doc from Clearwater had cruised up this way twice, and the captain is a marine surveyor. Maha Rani of Colorado, are in their early seventies; the captain was born and raised in India to missionary parents He did not return to the states until age 13. They had never boated before buying their first boat (a 42 footer at that!), and they charged ahead and completed the Great Loop ( a trip from Stuart, Fl to Canada, down the Great Lakes to Chicago, to the Tenn Tom to Mobile and back to Florida) in a year. Dorian is a sailboat from New Orleans; this couple had sailed to Europe twice and had gone to Canada. Then there are people here at the marina. The couple who owned the marina were boaters, and they had done the Great Loop in the 80s. They got to this marina, fell in love with the property and bought it. Most boaters came here for a couple of nights, and ended up staying for years, some as long as fifteen years! Amazing stories indeed.