We set off for Morgan City in a light fog. Throughout our entire trip we have experienced problems with our instruments freezing up or giving us no readings and our AIS has not been transmitting. Ed has been transmitting our position via an iPhone app. Ed spent a good part of the morning on the phone with Garmin support troubleshooting the problems. It is suspected that the instrument problem can be resolved with a firmware update which Garmin emailed to us but we will have to wait till we have an internet hotspot to download and test. The AIS was determined to be a bad device and Garmin shipped out a new one today. We will pick this up in Mobile. It is nice to have friends with family along the way. I am amazed at the number of bad products we have recently purchased (laptop, an NMEA2000 cable, a charge controller manufactured by Schneider Electric - whom Ed used to rep). I hope this is just a coincidence.
Upon our approach to Morgan City, we had to go under a railroad bridge with a reported clearance of 73 feet when open. Upon our first approach, it did not appear that we would clear the bridge so we aborted and Ed contacted Berwick Vessel Traffic Control to get assurance of the clearance and that the bridge was indeed all the way up. We got our assurance and approached the bridge puckering all the way thru. Once we were actually under the bridge it we apparent we had enough room. Ed did a nice job of parallel parking Slowdown between two shrimp boats as I stretched as far and high as I could to get off the boat onto the dock (2+ feet up) and secure the dock lines. Once safely docked, we quickly hooked up shore power, relaxed and took long hot showers. Long is a relative measure of time on a boat as "long" on a boat is no more than 5 minutes since water is a precious commodity even when there is more water available at the dock.
We decided to stay an extra day and get some chores done and see the town. We woke early and walked to the laundromat. After doing laundry, we went to the grocery store to re stock. Pokie (family of a good friend) stopped by to say hello. In the afternoon, we went for a walk and stopped at Shannon's hardware store and left with a few toys (supplies).
The rest of the evening was spent rewriting the blog as it was first composed on the computer but with no Internet access, we re typed it on the iPad. Please do not comment on the many typos.
We will post pics once we have Internet access.