Great Loop Chronicles Part 25
Marine
- Sponsor
- OPTIMA Batteries
- Location
- Gulf Shores, AL
The Great Loop Chronicles will be an ongoing series, following the travels of OPTIMA Batteries staffer, Jim McIlvaine, as he travels America's Great Loop, a 6000+ nautical mile journey around the Eastern United States.
The severe thunderstorms we encountered yesterday before our run over to Gautier, Mississippi should've taught me to monitor the weather closely before making way. Apparently, it didn't. I checked the forecast the night before and everything looked amazing- the calmest winds we'd had since we hit the Gulf coast. It wasn't our earliest start at 7AM, but we were on a new schedule- not pressing to be anywhere by a specific day.
Our next destination was Saunders Yachtworks in Gulf Shores, Alabama. When the stanchions hadn't arrived while we were at Safe Harbor Aqua Yacht in Iuka, Mississippi, we had them forward the parts to Saunders. Since we were planning on arriving on a Sunday, there was no urgent time we needed to arrive. I was also hoping they'd be able to look at our Purasan system, since it hadn't been functioning since we bought the boat.
The Purasan system somehow through the miracle of unbelievably pungent chlorine pucks, purifies your waste enough to legally discharge it in certain waters. I don't know that a boat surveyor has any way to test that, especially if the boat isn't in waters where it is legal to discharge. The previous owner indicated it probably just needed some pucks. I didn't realize he had a couple pucks in the engine compartment, so I ordered some to be shipped to my mother-in-laws in Pass Christian.
Then I saw that they had them at Aqua Yacht, so I bought some there as well. It's safe to say I'm flush with Purasan pucks...no pun intended. Unfortunately, I found the system needed more than pucks. It had a blown 10-amp fuse, which I was able to swap out, but when it popped the fuse again, Purasan's tech line suggested I start trouble shooting between two different motors. At the point, I threw in the towel and turned to the experts at Saunders and asked them to add that to their list.
As we made way into the Mississippi Sound, it was amazingly calm waters, which made it much easier to see the black crab pot buoys that dotted the horizon. About an hour out from Pass Christian, I decided to look at the radar. That was when I noticed the familiar line of storms that looked like a carbon copy of what we dealt with the day before. As we approached Mobile Bay, I got a call from one of our new friends, Eric, who had a boat at the Pass Christian Yacht Club and invited us over for drinks and appetizers the night before we left.
Eric saw the weather, knew I was a nervous captain and was calling to check in on me. Eric's advice was to stop short of Mobile Bay and ride out the storm in the open water, rather than dealing with the waves that the storm would like create in the Bay, as it swooped out of the Northwest. Gwendolyn and I felt differently. We'd been watching the line closing in on us and decided to make a run for it across the bay.
I normally run the boat twice a day at 18 knots, to keep the carbon from building up in the twin diesels, but I decided to make it an extended run today. We raced the line across the bay which was still very calm and surprisingly, kept a decent gap. I figured we could handle the winds much better, once we reached the protected intracoastal waterway, but the section that looked like it would pass directly over us started breaking up as it approached.
I called Eric when we exited the bay and he was glad to hear we'd made it. I said we'd never make Saunders before the line hit us, but at least we weren't out in the open. That's when Eric helped me realize Saunders and multiple locations and the one I had plugged into Navionics was nowhere near the one we were supposed to go to, which was just a few minutes away from us, just past Jimmy Buffett's sister's place, Lulu's. It was a 51-mile run that ended at noon.
We carefully pulled into Saunders and thankfully saw a permanent dock running the length of the Eastern Wall, but we'd be dealing with pilings again, which seemed much more managable with a dock. I saw the slips they use to lift yachts out of the water and decided not to park near the electric and water hookup directly behind those slips and went a little further in.
A very light rain and wind hit us, just as we were finishing up securing the boat and passed by a few minutes later. I hate to think of what we might've encountered, had we let a stronger section of the line hit us while we sat at the West side of Mobile Bay. As I went through my post-docking routine, I went to pause our Nebo tracking account, so it didn't look like we were running our boat wherever my phone happened to be on land. When I did that, I noticed a message from Jeff and Tricia Friday.
I mention the Fridays like they are old friends, but I had no idea who they were. They were Loopers, who had to stop their trip before they completed it. They were in the area, getting ready to sell their boat and were having dinner at one of the restaurants along the intracoastal, when they saw us going by with the AGLCA burgee flying on the bow. When they saw us pull into Saunders, they knew we were having work done and offered to help us out with running errands or whatever we might need, while we were in for repairs.
It seems like everyone we meet along the loop couldn't be more generous or helpful and it's really helping make the trip that much more enjoyable. In a sense, they're all total strangers, but in another sense, the common bond of serious boating really brings out the best in people. They know what the Great Loop is, what is involved in doing it and want to do anything they can to help see someone complete it, while having the time of their life.
We'd definitely make a point of connecting with the Fridays before we moved on, but the agenda today included finding open bathrooms on the Saunders property, getting the gate code from another boater on the hard and taking a leisurely walk down to Lulu's for dinner. Since Gulf Shores wasn't that much further than Gautier, the kids spent one more night at Grandma's. I took my second dockside hose shower in the last two days and we headed to Lulu's, which I've wanted to visit, since I first heard about it.
I knew it would have a lot of photos of Jimmy Buffett, likely from the family archives, but the one that hit me the most, was a picture of Jimmy walking alongside Charleston Miles, his longtime bodyguard. I had the incredibly good fortune to meet Jimmy several times over the years but had also gotten to know Charleston as well. They've both left us, so it was a touching photo to see them together.
Saunders is technically in a no-wake zone along the intracoastal, but more than a few boats seem to completely ignore that. Outside of their passing wakes, I was looking forward to very calm nights that were far removed from what we had in Pass Christian. I didn't know how long the stanchion installation or the Purasan repairs would take, but I felt like we were in a good place. We'd get some answers tomorrow.
The severe thunderstorms we encountered yesterday before our run over to Gautier, Mississippi should've taught me to monitor the weather closely before making way. Apparently, it didn't. I checked the forecast the night before and everything looked amazing- the calmest winds we'd had since we hit the Gulf coast. It wasn't our earliest start at 7AM, but we were on a new schedule- not pressing to be anywhere by a specific day.
Our next destination was Saunders Yachtworks in Gulf Shores, Alabama. When the stanchions hadn't arrived while we were at Safe Harbor Aqua Yacht in Iuka, Mississippi, we had them forward the parts to Saunders. Since we were planning on arriving on a Sunday, there was no urgent time we needed to arrive. I was also hoping they'd be able to look at our Purasan system, since it hadn't been functioning since we bought the boat.
The Purasan system somehow through the miracle of unbelievably pungent chlorine pucks, purifies your waste enough to legally discharge it in certain waters. I don't know that a boat surveyor has any way to test that, especially if the boat isn't in waters where it is legal to discharge. The previous owner indicated it probably just needed some pucks. I didn't realize he had a couple pucks in the engine compartment, so I ordered some to be shipped to my mother-in-laws in Pass Christian.
Then I saw that they had them at Aqua Yacht, so I bought some there as well. It's safe to say I'm flush with Purasan pucks...no pun intended. Unfortunately, I found the system needed more than pucks. It had a blown 10-amp fuse, which I was able to swap out, but when it popped the fuse again, Purasan's tech line suggested I start trouble shooting between two different motors. At the point, I threw in the towel and turned to the experts at Saunders and asked them to add that to their list.
As we made way into the Mississippi Sound, it was amazingly calm waters, which made it much easier to see the black crab pot buoys that dotted the horizon. About an hour out from Pass Christian, I decided to look at the radar. That was when I noticed the familiar line of storms that looked like a carbon copy of what we dealt with the day before. As we approached Mobile Bay, I got a call from one of our new friends, Eric, who had a boat at the Pass Christian Yacht Club and invited us over for drinks and appetizers the night before we left.
Eric saw the weather, knew I was a nervous captain and was calling to check in on me. Eric's advice was to stop short of Mobile Bay and ride out the storm in the open water, rather than dealing with the waves that the storm would like create in the Bay, as it swooped out of the Northwest. Gwendolyn and I felt differently. We'd been watching the line closing in on us and decided to make a run for it across the bay.
I normally run the boat twice a day at 18 knots, to keep the carbon from building up in the twin diesels, but I decided to make it an extended run today. We raced the line across the bay which was still very calm and surprisingly, kept a decent gap. I figured we could handle the winds much better, once we reached the protected intracoastal waterway, but the section that looked like it would pass directly over us started breaking up as it approached.
I called Eric when we exited the bay and he was glad to hear we'd made it. I said we'd never make Saunders before the line hit us, but at least we weren't out in the open. That's when Eric helped me realize Saunders and multiple locations and the one I had plugged into Navionics was nowhere near the one we were supposed to go to, which was just a few minutes away from us, just past Jimmy Buffett's sister's place, Lulu's. It was a 51-mile run that ended at noon.
We carefully pulled into Saunders and thankfully saw a permanent dock running the length of the Eastern Wall, but we'd be dealing with pilings again, which seemed much more managable with a dock. I saw the slips they use to lift yachts out of the water and decided not to park near the electric and water hookup directly behind those slips and went a little further in.
A very light rain and wind hit us, just as we were finishing up securing the boat and passed by a few minutes later. I hate to think of what we might've encountered, had we let a stronger section of the line hit us while we sat at the West side of Mobile Bay. As I went through my post-docking routine, I went to pause our Nebo tracking account, so it didn't look like we were running our boat wherever my phone happened to be on land. When I did that, I noticed a message from Jeff and Tricia Friday.
I mention the Fridays like they are old friends, but I had no idea who they were. They were Loopers, who had to stop their trip before they completed it. They were in the area, getting ready to sell their boat and were having dinner at one of the restaurants along the intracoastal, when they saw us going by with the AGLCA burgee flying on the bow. When they saw us pull into Saunders, they knew we were having work done and offered to help us out with running errands or whatever we might need, while we were in for repairs.
It seems like everyone we meet along the loop couldn't be more generous or helpful and it's really helping make the trip that much more enjoyable. In a sense, they're all total strangers, but in another sense, the common bond of serious boating really brings out the best in people. They know what the Great Loop is, what is involved in doing it and want to do anything they can to help see someone complete it, while having the time of their life.
We'd definitely make a point of connecting with the Fridays before we moved on, but the agenda today included finding open bathrooms on the Saunders property, getting the gate code from another boater on the hard and taking a leisurely walk down to Lulu's for dinner. Since Gulf Shores wasn't that much further than Gautier, the kids spent one more night at Grandma's. I took my second dockside hose shower in the last two days and we headed to Lulu's, which I've wanted to visit, since I first heard about it.
I knew it would have a lot of photos of Jimmy Buffett, likely from the family archives, but the one that hit me the most, was a picture of Jimmy walking alongside Charleston Miles, his longtime bodyguard. I had the incredibly good fortune to meet Jimmy several times over the years but had also gotten to know Charleston as well. They've both left us, so it was a touching photo to see them together.
Saunders is technically in a no-wake zone along the intracoastal, but more than a few boats seem to completely ignore that. Outside of their passing wakes, I was looking forward to very calm nights that were far removed from what we had in Pass Christian. I didn't know how long the stanchion installation or the Purasan repairs would take, but I felt like we were in a good place. We'd get some answers tomorrow.