November 21, 2009 Old Lock #1 to Bates Lake

November 21, 2009

Old Lock #1 Park to Bates Lake

We can’t make it to Mobile Bay because it is over 100 miles away so we will again travel with Queen Ann’s Revenge and Young America to Bates Lake. Millennium Seas will try to go a little further so tomorrow won’t be such a long day. We traveled about 55 miles to another setting that during normal water levels may have been difficult for us to get in and out of.

We arrived at Bates Lake around 12:30. Lakes here are kind of small, but Bates was considerably bigger with the high water. One side of the lake was bordered with cottages on stilts and most landings were private. We were looking for a landing to use when going to shore with Port. We traveled the entire length of the lake past the cottages to a small point encircled by trees when we got a bit of a scare.

We were carefully turning around when unexpectedly we lost reverse on our port side. Mark was doing a lot of frantic shifting, I was doing a lot of frantic yelling as Grateful parked herself in the woods. Grateful was wedged into the trees all the way to our wooden sidedoors and we were still in forward. Mark moved so fast to the upper station with no luck with the shift levers, then he tore up the carpet and the hatch to the engine room. He was able to put Grateful into reverse from there and I realized that I needed to drive and shifted starboard into reverse so we could back out straight. Mark raced up to the controls because I was panicking again. He shut down the port engine and somehow managed to get us between the cottages on either side of the lake into a wider area. There we anchored and began to take stock of our damages.

We were strewn with leaves, Spanish moss, ants, spiders from the trees. The windshield on the upper drive station was in pieces, the portside gate bracket was gone and there were some minor scuffs on the port side. Young America had stayed close and after surveying the hull said we looked OK. What incredible good fortune.

Mark diagnosed the difficulty as a screw working itself free of the shift linkage disabling both upper and lower stations. While he repaired the damage, I busied myself with sweeping all the leaves off the boat and picking up the windshield. Once that was done we were finally able to talk about it and again realized how lucky we were. If this had happened anytime sooner we might have parked our pulpit in somebody’s livingroom. If the water hadn’t been so high we might have damaged props, shafts or other parts of the hull. The windshield was old, checked and we were considering replacing it at some point anyway. We were also able to talk about things we could have done differently, and maybe most importantly we were able to laugh about some of the crazy things we did.

The Bates Lake anchorage was peaceful in spite of all our excitement. The folks were friendly on shore – Port and I enjoyed our long walk. It rained until midnight, but our anchor held.