Saturday July 18 and Sunday July 19, 2015
We’d heard that you should stay put on weekends, and let the locals and tourists take over the waterway. We were planning on moving on from our Friday night stay at lock 7, but that was not to be.
We left lock 7, and I was immediately alarmed. The exhaust sounded like a bad muffler. I told Jim to check the water intake strainer. We’d been tied up to the lock wall, and there had been a lot of weed in the water. Jim decided that the impeller was the problem,  We anchored about 2 miles from lock 7, called our new friends from the night before to get the name snd number of their boat mechanic, Jim worked on the problem, and Grace and I went swimming. Jim got the impeller out (and it was ok), but could not get the new one in. So we spent a lovely day and night at anchor. Next morning Freddy the mechanic showed up, popped the impeller back in, and suggested that we come down to his dock below lock 7 if we had any problems. Jim jumped over the side, at my suggestion, and yes, the water intake was clogged with weed. He cleaned that out, and the water filter, and we thought we were fixed. Turned on the engine. Wrong! It still sounded like a bad muffler in the aft.
We pulled up anchor and backtracked to lock 7. We hit a rock, and then another, trying to get out of the way of a big power boat behind us. The jolt cured whatever was ailing us! We swung by the mechanic’s dock with the good news, then headed back thru lock 7.
We had hoped to get some miles under our belt, but that was no to be. Huge thunderheads were forming to our north. A massive front was moving through. We anchored in almost the same spot we had been in the night before. We waved to the house on shore, and yelled “we are back!” Grace learned how to work the Sirius weather map on our chartplotter, and we battened down for the storm. Luckily the storm missed us. We had a few minutes of high winds and some rain, but basically we were spared.
After the storm, Grace, Mr Fish, and I swam to shore to thank the farmer and his family for looking out for us. The mechanic had used his boat to get to us.
Beautiful sky after the storm!