The Man of the Hour!

November 7

When we lost the anchor and chain we reached out to Bobby’s Fish Camp and asked them if they knew of a local fisherman who might be interested in retrieving it for a $500 reward. This mighty fine fellow, Ben Garland answered the call. On the first night, Ben and a buddy searched the area and hooked on the chain, tied a rope with a float to it and gave up about 11PM. Went back the next day, placed a large shackle around the chain and ran it upriver till he found the anchor. BTW, a shackle is kinda like a horseshoe with a bolt that runs across the open end. On Day 3 of this treasure hunt (I call it a treasure hunt because it would cost me about $2400 to replace my ground tackle).


Once he located the anchor, at this point bear in mind anchors are designed to bury themselves in the seabottom to securely hold a boat. Well, this thing was dug in like a hair in a biscuit. Now that he is close to the anchor he hooked up a come-along.

A come-along is a hand operated winch that he connected to a tree on one end and the anchor chain on the other. And then he started to crank…and crank.
Day 3 gets here and VIOLA he gets it out of the river. Calls me and sez he has retrieved it but he needs a ‘lil more ‘n the $500 we agreed on. Two tanks of fuel and 3 days with help from a few other guys. What’s fair I ask. His response is $900. Bring it to me? I counterd. He agreed. I was happy. He was happy.
Never been so happy to see a hunk of metal in my life. At this point Ben pulls the 200 feet of chain out of his truck bed to the ground so we can find the ends of the chain. I had a couple of carts from the marina to bring the anchor and chain to the boat. I start to put the chain in one of the carts and he says “I’d help ya, but I want you to get a taste of that chain.” I did.
After I got the muddy mess of chain back to the boat I laid it out on the dock and hosed it off. Notice the blue/white/blue section of chain? I have painted it every 25 feet so I know how much I have paid out when anchoring. That particular section is the 150 foot mark.
25’-white
50’-blue
75’-green
100’-red
125’-double white
150’-double blue
175’-double green
200’-double red

View of the chain locker in front of the bed in the forward cabin. I have it temporarily secured until I can get it properly affixed. More on that when it happens.
The Bitch is Back!
A happy ending to what could have been an expensive setback.
This fine fellow is my buddy Marviin Wehl from Crimson Tug. We met he and his delightful bride Nancy during our respite in Demopolis. He and Nancy show up at Whisky Business yesterday morning and inquired as to whether or not Debbie and I would like to accompany them to breakfast.
“Not with those socks” was our response.
Another “Target Rich Environment” Couldn’t help myself, really gave him hell over those ankle warmers. I had Nancy laughing so hard she nearly soiled herself as she had already pleaded with him to remove the offensive footwear.

Footnote:
For someone like me who is not terribly literate in IT I am a bit flumoxed as to why this particular blog soft ware will no longer let me add video content to my posts. Sort of. If you receive a notice via email that a new post is available and click on it in your email, the video’s do not show up. HOWEVER, if you go the the web address of this blog,
(http://mvwhiskybusiness.com) the video will show up.
Why? Dunno.
So in the future when there is a video attached I will tell you VIDEO HERE. At that point if you haven’t fallen asleep yet, go to the above address and you can view it there. I would suggest you go back to the previous posts since we left Louisville as there are a few there. Best one being of our friend Julie Shaffer singing her favorite country song.
VIDEO HERE
I am adding a video of the welcoming committee that greeted us upon our arrival to the ICW at the bottom of Mobile Bay.

Holed up again.

We are in a great marina, The Wharf in Orange Beach, Alabama and it appears Hurricane Eta is coming our way.

Image from the NOAA app that shows Eta’s track and forcasted route. The circles are the actual track thus far and the little hurricane icons are the forcasted track. As you can see the forecast has it approaching the Florida Panhandle. Our current location is the little blue and white icon just under the time lapse bar.
In retrospect we should have waited until the middle of November to leave Louisville as hurricane season does not end until the end of November. But dammit, I hate being cold on a boat!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: