Thursday, October 29, 2009

This was “Dreaded Blue Screen Thursday.” Our hard drive crashed! We used the computer last night to make our ‘Skype’ calls and this morning it would not start. Maureen was up by 5:30 am to get some work done on the computer and spent from 6 am to 7:30 am trying to figure out what the problem was. She spent from 8 am to 12:30 pm on the phone with various Dell representatives and finally came to the conclusion that the hard drive was “toast.” A fellow boater who had overheard a portion of the conversation with technical support offered to put the replacement hard drive in. She said she believed that it is the excessive vibration from the boat that causes boaters’ hard drives to go out so often and mentioned that she has gone to a “solid state” computer with fewer moving parts and not as susceptible to rough handling. It would have been nice to have someone knowledgeable help us with the task, but we were leaving Demopolis this afternoon and would have to do it ourselves.

We fueled up before leaving the marina and were on our way about 1 pm. We cleared the Demopolis Lock at 1:35 pm and headed downriver accompanied by mostly sunny skies and temperatures in the lower 80’s. After about 15 miles, we passed the remnants of what little remains of the old Rooster Bridge.


On April 19, 1979, when the river was at a record level of 24 feet above flood stage, the tugboat Cahaba was pushed sideways by a powerful current into the steel drawbridge and went down and under the Rooster Bridge. Eyewitnesses feared the worst as they saw the tug disappear into the muddy water and heard the sound of it being scraped and banged along the underside of the bridge. Because the tug had a lot of cement ballast, it popped up on the other side. Badly battered and with water pouring out of its pilothouse, the tug still had one of its two engines running. Three crewmembers, although badly shaken, weren’t seriously injured. The bridge, already scheduled to be demolished, was removed a few months later. The tug was eventually sold, repaired and now works out of Charleston, West Virginia. In today’s blog you will see a photo of the bridge remains as well as a couple of pictures of a tall metal piling where the record high water level was recorded.

At 4:30 pm we arrived at Chickasaw Bogue, mile 187.5, the only available anchorage noted in this 30-mile stretch. Unexpectedly, we will remember it among our favorite anchorages of the Loop. We beached the boat on a very nice sandbar just off the river and stepped out onto the beach where Lucy ran while we explored. Lucy ended up rolling in something dead and rotting, so she received a bath before getting back up on the boat. This was such a remote area, we had difficulty getting cellular phone service – not the first time that has happened!