Sailing Dragonfly: Louisiana marshes: weather, monotony, and delays

Typical scenery along the Louisiana ICW, forever and ever.

Hello faithful readers. For the past four days, we have been traversing thru the marshes of southern Louisiana along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). There have been all sorts of highs and lows along the way.

We got boarded by the Coast Guard for a routine
safety inspection. The guys were courteous and professional.

The weather has, for the most part, been favorable. The notable exception was on Monday, when it rained lightly all day, then totally drenched us in the middle of the night. It actually was supposed to be much WORSE, according to the forecast - they were warning of "flash flooding". Well, if it's gonna flood, I suppose the best place to be is on a boat! Anyway, this open cockpit catamaran doesn't do a good job of keeping its crew and contents dry. We rigged up some tarps to slow the water ingress down a bit, but that's all it did: slow it down. Yes there is a sleeping cabin below, but there's no ventilation down there, and you can't open its overhead hatch if it's pouring down rain.

ICW from Mermantau to south of Abbeville

Also weather-related are the constant easterly winds. Since our route is dead to the east, it's impractical to raise up the sails and actually SAIL, so we must use engine propulsion all the time. These easterly winds, by the way, are exactly why we are in the ICW in the first place, and not out in the Gulf bashing head-first into wind and waves.

ICW from Abbeville-south to Morgan City

So how is the ICW, you ask? Well I will tell you: most of the time, here in these Louisiana marshes, it's just down right monotonous. Mile after mile after mile of straight-as-an-arrow waterway with not a smidgeon of diverse scenery on the banks. (At least we have an audio music system to provide entertainment.) I got my trusty camera close at hand to take snaps of anything interesting we see, which rarely happens. Every so often, something cool DOES come along, and I snap away. See some of the photos on this blog.

ICW from Morgan City to Houma

Cypress swamp

The stretch between Morgan City and Houma, however, was truly gorgeous. The ICW takes a winding path thru a cypress swamp. The banks were lined with 100-foot-tall cypress trees, each branch draped with hanging moss. I just couldn't get enough of those amazing trees.

mosquito net in cockpit

When the sun goes down, we typically find a wide spot in the channel, pull over, and drop anchor. There is always a cacophony of frogs and crickets. But bugs at night are a constant irritation. We deploy our mosquito net and practically BATHE ourselves with repellant. Come morning, we get awakened, not by sunlight, but by BIRDS singing. Kinda cool.

The delays at locks and drawbridges are frustrating. It's not unusual to wait a whole hour to get thru one of them, sitting in queue with the barges. And some drawbridges only open at certain hours. After waiting for an unusually long time at the Bayou Boeuf Locks (just east of Morgan City), we got on the VHF radio to ask what the heck was going on. Someone came back and told us that the @#$%& locks were CLOSED due to maintenance! There was an alternate route, but it involved a lot of back-tracking and going many, many miles out of our way. Arrgggh!!!

Morgan City has three bridges in a row

I often find myself comparing this waterway-based journey to a road trip in a car. Yeah, some stretches of highway can get monotonous too - but in a car, you're going, like, 70 miles an hour; this boat only goes about 6. Well, at least on a boat, you can move around, and you're not strapped into a seatbelt. Whimsical has auto-steering, which is a real godsend! You can take your hands off the wheel, get up, move around, get a snack or a drink, change clothes, take a pee, whatever. (Wish I had this on Dragonfly.)

Downtown Marina in Houma, between two fixed bridges.
They did not have restrooms or showers, so we did not stay there.

We needed to procure a hand bilge pump. When we were out in the Gulf on day 1, waves crashing over the bow got into one of the lockers on the foredeck. The added weight put Whimsical terribly out-of-balance, and we had no way to remove the water. I did some Googling and found a hardware store in south Abbeville, right on the water, that had one. "Great", I exclaimed, "we'll be there first thing in the morning!" Only to be told, "Um, tomorrow is Sunday, and we're closed." Arrgghh!! Days of the week mean NOTHING to a couple of retired guys on a long journey, but evidently, the rest of the world still runs on fixed schedules. No way we would sit here a full day till they opened, so we moved on. It would be three more days, driving an out-of-balance boat, before we found another place, in Houma, that had what we needed, and we could get to from the water. We ended up tying up at a nearby RV park that had a dock, and walking to the hardware store. But, we got the pump, sucked out the water, and Whimsical returned to her formerly lightweight, spry self. Onward ho!

ICW from Houma to New Orleans

Sunset on the Mississippi River.
"Change of Plans" mast is ahead.

Tuesday night we made it to New Orleans. Here, the ICW transverses the Mississippi River for a short distance. To get into it, we went thru the Algiers Lock, which lowers our boat down a few feet. There was another sailboat called "Change of Plans", which had left Kemah a day after us - they caught up with us in the lock. By the time we all cleared the lock and got out into the river, the sun was going down. It was now too late to transverse the Claiborne Avenue drawbridge, so we all had to find a place to spend the night. But the other boat's skipper knew of a nearby dock where we could both tie up, so we followed them there, and made some new friends.