Our Indiana Connections Continue...

We live about 30 miles from Madisonville, LA which hosts a magnificent Wooden Boat Festival each year. This is always a fun event because it focuses on water activities, wooden boats, and has a real family orientation (although you don't really need many family connections to just go there and drink beer!). This year we went and met up with Milana and Tracy who were hosting friends, Danny and Sherrie Johnson from Indiana. The weather wasn't exactly cooperative, but worked out that we were all able to do most of what we came to the festival for.

After looking at all of the food and craft booths, we hooked up with Milana & Tracy's crew and boarded the Robert E. Lee party boat which was brought to the Madisonville wall by Capt. Donnie Weiss. The Weiss's hosted a really nice party and provided riverside seats for the festival's fabricated boat race. In this race contestant teams have two days to construct a wooden boat that team members launch in the river and sail and paddle over a course to claim victory. Of the approximately 18 boats that were launched, about 12 actually completed the race with about a half-dozen sinking sometime between the launch and the start of the race. After the race we left the boat and wandered over to one of the band stages to listen to some music. The band was really good, but it started to rain and Jane & Larry decided that it was time to head home. However, before we left we invited Danny & Sherrie to join us for dinner at our place in Florida when they come over for Danny's graduation at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in a few days. It turned out to be a really small world as Danny's parents were flying in from Detroit Lakes, MN to attend the ceremony which was where Larry was stationed for 5 years at the White Earth Indian Reservation. We all got together and talked just about everything including Larry & Jane's motorcycle trip through MN last year, ice fishing, Water Carnival, Lake Sallie, and even lutefisk! It was a real hoot. We had a really wonderful time and Larry's shrimp fettuccine and black bean dip, and Jane's Bavarian cream were real hits. We parted for the evening, but we are all pretty sure that we will run into each other again in the future.

Overnighting on the Tickfaw

The weather got cooler and the humidity dropped from the summertime sweatshop level, so we decided that a night on Bavarian Cream was in order. We checked out the weather forecasts and thought that we had a really good weather window. Then Jane got a call from her grandson, Brennan, inviting her to his middle high school football game on Saturday. Jane told him about our plans and he said that we were crazy and were going to get caught in some lousy weather. We were pretty sure that we would be back at the home port before the weather turned on us. Cutting to the chase, Brennan was right and we were wrong! But the interesting part of the trip was the fact that we took Jane's dog, Tarzan, for an overnight on the boat for the very first time, which proved to be a really challenging experience as far as the controlling his bodily functions are concerned.

We headed out to Lake Maurepas late afternoon. Once there, we let the boat drift while we consumed the 1 1/2 dozen of blue crabs we bought and drank a lot of beer. Jane did her usual outstanding job of cracking the crabs, so all Larry had to do was eat and spit shells. We also grilled some steaks and potatoes, but decided that the sun was setting and we needed to get to an anchorage. We ended up anchoring just a short distance from the lake opposite of the Prop Stop. The Prop Stop is a really popular "river bar" that is only accessible by water. We got the boat secured just as the sun was setting, then enjoyed our steaks and potatoes. After dinner and a few drinks and admiring our first full moon on the boat and river, we turned in for the night expecting to get up in the morning and return to the boat slip. Around 0330 we were both awakened by thunder, lightening, heavy wind, and a hard downpour of rain. Our first storm on the boat. Larry was up for over an hour fretting about whether the anchor would hold. Jane hardly sleeps at all when we are on the hook, and the storm only exacerbated the situation. We really encountered a nasty storm and felt lucky that the anchor held and we didn't have any major problems. In fact, the anchor held so well that the windlass could not dislodged it the next day. We had to pull the anchor out with the boat which was a first, but gave us confidence on our anchoring abilities. After a light breakfast, we head for home with Jane at the helm. She piloted us home and even had the confidence to back Bavarian Cream into the slip. All in all it was quite an experience and much more than we bargained for.