Yankees

We are in Joe Wheeler State Park tonight (Monday)
I mentioned earlier that we had met several loopers on our trip.  Today, we caught up with all of them.  They're having the AGLCA Rendezvous here at Wheeler this week.  That's America's Great Loop Cruiser's Association.  If you don't know what the great loop is, look it up.

The AGLCA took over the entire marina. Every transient slip full, every room in the lodge full.

The park was nice enough to squeeze us in a slip down with the sailboats.  We've been 230 miles downstream.  I think we will start back upstream tomorrow.

I found one boat from Indiana--sort of.  Turns out they are the grandparents of my young friend Bret's best friend, Chris.

Whenever we wear our IU or Colts shirts, I always hear mumbles of "Yankees" as we pass the locals.  Try as I might, I just can't get the "How Ya'all" to sound southeren.  So I just nod my head, and let Pam talk.  She's from Louisville, and though she's been in the NOrth for a lot of years, she can still speak passable southernease.

Thinking back to my trip on this river with Bret, one of the funniest things I remember was our rescue of 4 souls on a small aluminum fishing boat.  We saw the guy in the front of this little boat standing up and waving his hands.  Bret and I had given some thought to the possibility of encountering river pirates or other miscreants, and thought this might be one of those opportunities.  The guy in front said they needed to be towed to shore. They had a fuel problem  (ran out of gas).   They had not, however run out of beer. We asked if they had a paddle.  They said "yes, but we keep going around in circles.  We seen somebody paddling on TV once, and it looked easy, but it ain't."

I told Bret to throw them the end of one of our old lines, and keep a close watch on them.  If they started to pull themselves to our boat, he should cut the line, and we would leave them.  Bret threw the guy standing in the front of their boat our line, but he missed it.  Bret got the line back in, and threw it a little stronger the second time, and it hit the guy standing in the front of the boat right in the face.  His eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell backwards over the side of their little boat.  I told Bret not to let him swim to our boat.  He somehow was able to re-board their boat without capsizing it and putting the other 3 occupants in the water.  Bret once again threw him a line, and we were able to tow them to shore.  As I recall, we ended up towing them several miles back to the launching ramp where their truck was.  And I also recall that we didn't get as much as a "Thanks, Yankees."










we are in