Get out of our way Bea Sounier!!

Today we left South Shore Harbor Marina in New Orleans after being there 3 days and never set eyes on anything in New Orleans, except Walmart!  Oh well, I don't think we missed much that we would be interested in. 

We woke up to winds out of the North at about 15 knots and we had to enter Lake Pontchartrain to get back on the ICW and the waves again just tossed us around like a cork.  We tried to reduce our windage by opening up all our eisenglass windows and then we were freezing.  It was not the  way I wanted to start my Monday morning but we survived and things calmed down once we entered the ICW.

Ken told us we should not see much more barge traffic now that we were east of the Mississippi River but we think every tug decided to wait for us to get going and they then all got in line in the narrow channel ahead of us.  It made for an extremely SLOW day since there were about 6-8 of them in a line and it was virtually impossible to pass any of them.  We literally travelled at idle speed (which for us is about 4 knots).  It was like 1604 or 281 in rush hour traffic all day.



When we finally got to the Mississippi Sound we were #1 very excited to get to a new state and #2 to have more area to spread out and get away from all the slow moving traffic.  We then made decent time to our destination for today which was Bay St. Louis Harbor Marina. (We don't have any pictures of our experience in Lake Pontchartrain or the Mississippi Sound.  We were in "bracing for impact mode" most of the time and pics were not on our minds.)

I don't think that Brent has yet embraced the relaxation part of retirement. He shot the finger at two boats today. First was a crab boat that sped across our path about 25 feet from our bow. Next was a Tugboat named Bea Sounier. He had passed us in the ICW canal at around 8.5 knots pushing two red flag loads strung out. Almost immediately he slowed to 5 knots and stayed there in the narrow canal all day varying his speed from 5 knots to a dead stop (several times) causing everyone behind him to scramble to avoid him. Well, Brent got close enough behind the Tug to be both heard and seen. Can't wait to see what happens if/when we see this Tug later down the ICW. There's probably a secret Tug message board that has our name on it.


This is a beautiful marina that is only about 3 years old and has the best access to restaurants and shops in this quant little town within walking distance, remember we don't have a car!

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