Good Morning from the Mermentau River

We woke to the sounds of gunfire.  Apparently it is duck season in LA.  Even with those sounds around us, the best news was that we had stayed securely planted in our anchorage for the entire night. Exactly how we did this was confirmed to us when we raised the anchor and lifted our souvenirs from the bottom (many trees branches and mud)!  We stowed the anchor and snubber line and left at 7:30 headed to Morgan Shell Landing, about 42 miles.


The evening before a trip, we plan our course using Navionics (which is an app) that shows electronic navigational charts that match the ones we have on our Chartplotter up on the flybridge. This allows us to see where our destination is and what we will encounter along the way.  When we choose a place to stop we either anchor, tie to a dock or go into a marina.  As we are underway, I research the places that are at our next location by looking on Active Captain, another app.  That app gives me details about the facility like the number of available slips, any size limitations on boat length or beam, pricing, and most importantly reviews written about the place by other boaters.  It is very much like a Trip Advisor for marinas. 
One thing we have observed is that all the GICW is very well marked going through LA.  The depths are consistent from one side of the channel to the other unlike many shallow sides in Texas' part of the GICW.  We really enjoyed the numerous bald eagles that we saw today.  The dolphins from Kemah to Galveston have been replaced by bald eagles.  Thankfully we haven't seen any alligators yet.


Tonight we are at Shell Morgan Landing.  
So far we have travelled 215 miles in approximately 40 hours.  We took on 126 gallons of diesel today (we hold 300 gallons total) which means that we are burning just over 3 gallons an hour.  This is quite impressive since other boats that we were considering before this one would burn 20+ gallons of fuel an hour. Another way to look at it is we were getting 1.8 mpg and we are pleased with that.





One last pic for today......


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fort Myers Beach and Downtown Fort Myers

Image
Fort Myers Beach proved to be yet another popular destination as you can see from the pics.  You would think that the temperature was in the high 80s with all the people on the beach but on this day it was barely over 70 but that didn't seem to hinder the population.  Downtown Fort Myers, which is walkable from the marina, always seems to have something going on. On Friday they had a Music Walk and as we went from one performance to another we weren't sure if the performers just picked their own spot to set up or if it was organized.  They offered a wide variety that ranged from a 10 year old country singer to 65-75 year olds band with horns.  There was something for everyone!   
Read more

Making our lists and checking them twice

Image
As Brent and I pondered retirement, we wanted to be active and do something together.  We considered moving to a smaller house in a smaller city but that didn't spur any ideas of how we would fill our time. (For those of you who know me well, you know that I need to be busy most of the time.) We had always enjoyed being on the water and had owned boats for almost 20 years. So we decided that maybe living on a boat would be different yet, enjoyable.  We spent more than a year looking for the perfect live aboard boat with the idea of spending 6-12 months in one marina and then cruising on to another location. As we searched, we revisited an idea Brent had many years back.  He wanted to do the Great Loop.  In a weak moment, I agreed and then the type of boat we needed for The Loop changed drastically.  We needed something that was economical, had a long range, wasn't too large and wasn't too tall. (Lots of bridges to pass under).  In April 2017 we finally ...
Read more

Get out of our way Bea Sounier!!

Image
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....
Read more