AGROUND!

AHHOOHGAH!  AHHOOHGAH! AHHOOHGAH!  ALL HANDS ON DECK!  WE'VE RUN AGROUND!!!

Broken Dreams

Sickening Lurch

     Remember the servant on the Addams family?  Well he's getting worse.  Sickening lurch might be a cliche, but it's the most apropos phrase for when your boat stops suddenly and you keep going.  We were approaching the Florence bridge and Jan was at the wheel.  She had been there far too long while I was below trying to construct this blog.  There was a big tow (tug and barges) coming up behind us, so, Jan decided to take the right span instead of the center where the tow would come.  Unbeknownst (love that word) to us, they had recently dredged there and left a spoil bank under the bridge.  We ran up on it at full speed and went abruptly from 10' of water to 2'.  The bow was high and dry with the waterline at least a cubit above the water at the stem, and we were in 1.5 knots of current.  We named the two kids Florence and Bridger-  see previous blog.  Okay, what now?  We ran two of our largest anchors out up river and tightened up on them with the windlass and a winch.  We've never been so cranky.  Got the rodes (lines) bar tight and smoked the engine in reverse.  Nothing so much as a hint.  Then the windlass quit, so we had to transfer the port line to the winch.  Fortunately, it was only the circuit breaker.  We tightened up (Archie Bell and the Drells)  so much we pulled the port anchor into the boat.  I decided that we needed some lateral twist to wrench that wench off the bar, so we ran it back out to the side and re-cranked.  All this was done in the dinghy, in the current.  We are cranking away and just waiting for one of those big wake makers to come along and give us some rise.  Scarcer than genuine smiles at a fund raiser.  All the while we were shouting and radioing forth and back to the bridge tender as to help from other boats (thanks, Rock Chalk, for stopping)  and the Coasties.  Just as the phone rang from the St. Louis office of the Coast Guard,  I put the boat in reverse one more time and we slipped gently back toward our anchors and didn't even tangle them in our prop. That felt better, as Huck Finn would say,"than church getting out".  All told, we wasted about 4.5 hours, got a good workout,  and got a good lesson in kedging off.  No damage to the boat.  Onward and downward!