High Water

Some famous cruiser said the worst thing to have on a pleasure boat is a "Schedule", so we have abandoned ours, (the schedule not the plan). We will just wait and be patient (right).

Because of heavy rain in MO and IA and melting snow in southern WI the Mississippi is in major flood stage at many locations. The river in the St Louis area is high and still rising. Therefor we stayed home this week rather than going back to the boat as planned.

The forecast is for the river at St Charles to crest on May 6, (next Wed.) so we plan now to drive to the boat next week and do some work and shopping when we get there. Then hopefully by about the middle of May we can be under way to Lake Barkley.

Actually the Ohio and Missouri rivers both of which were in flood stage early have receded and are now OK. So all we need is for the Mississippi above St. Louis to recede some.

We will post again when we get aboard, hopefully next week.

We have taken Delivery

On March 24th we loaded up the van and drove to St Charles, MO to start moving aboard. As you can see even with both back seats out there was not room for anything more. The rest was set aside for the next trip. Since it is a nine hour drive and all of our bedding was in the car we took a motel for the night and went down to the marina the next morning.




























When we got to the marina the next morning there in the water was our beautiful new Gibson Houseboat. Just waiting for us. Thanks to Wahoo-Marine the dealer and Polestar Marina.

Also there to greet us was the local air-force with a fly by in our honor. The Pelicans are migrating through the area and there were hundreds in the area along with cormorants and herons, all came into the harbor and up close to the boat. It was fun watching them catch fish just a few feet from the boat.









We spent most of the day caring load after load of stuff from the car to the boat and tried to find homes for all of it. Diana had measured the windows when we were on the boat at the boat show and made curtains, so she was anxious to see how they would look.







The next day we took advantage of West Marine's new boat owners discount (10% of for 30 days) and shopped and shopped. Then we went to Home Depot for more shopping, towel racks, cupboard inserts and much more. Through it all the weather was not great. Two mornings were in the low thirty's. The heaters worked well, but it took a little time to balance the two zone thermostat set up. We had two nights with thunderstorms and a couple of all day rains. (No leaks detected.) The next day we installed all the hardware from Home depot and found homes for and installed the West Marine gear.


Finally on Sunday we had a chance to take the boat out for a cruise. Both the President of Wahoo-Marine, Scott and the salesman, Tom were on board with there wives. We had a great time even though the weather was not great and the river level was still high with a lot of debris. The boat ran great and the small diesels performed great, very quite.






Monday we got the vinyl graphics on the fly bridge, but before we could do the transom it started to rain. It looked like an all day rain so we took it easy and packed up to drive home the next morning.


Just about sunset the rain let up and we found that Tom and Scott of Wahoo Marine had delivered our dream right at the end of the rainbow at Polestar Marina.



We will be returning to the boat about April 28th - 29th to hopefully cruise down to Lake Barkley and the Cumberland River. That area is current experiencing heavy flooding so we maybe delayed a bit and just cruise the Alton area. Look for regular update to the blog beginning about May 1st.