Mayfly attack, learning to troubleshoot, quilts, rafting and Green Turtles

October 4 through October 8 (Click on the images to see and scroll them in full size)

We woke up to a bit of a horror scene. There must have been a mayfly hatch near the boats and Patriot had THOUSANDS of mayflies on her hull and windows. It was truly epic but that took a backseat when the words "Houston, we have a problem" popped into my head. We had an electrical problem that threw me for a loop. On these cold mornings, around 40 degrees, I turn the heater on on the boat so that when Christine gets up it is more pleasant. All of a sudden the heater quit and I noticed my battery levels were dropping and my generator was NOT charging. Oh crap.

Once I figured out that we had tripped the breaker on the generator and that the inverter was running all of the electrical off of the batteries, we were good to go. It did not come to mind initially because in the 5 years we have had Patriot, we never tripped that breaker. This was just a reminder that I need to be better at troubleshooting these issues because when we are at anchor I am all that we have.

After a few hours on the Ohio River, we arrived at Paducah, KY and we rafted off of Encore, an American Tug 34 from our group. Two other members of our group continued on to Kentucky Lake and Green Turtle Bay Marina.

Paducah has got to be one of our favorite stops yet. Railroad museum, quilt museum, museum of the river and more. There were more restaurants that we could eat at in 2 days, lots of antique stores and the people were great. Since I can always use brownie points, our first stop was the National Quilt Museum. It was AMAZING. I have a hard time with the patience putting together a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle and the level of detail and stitching on these quilts was unbelievable.

We even got to do a free bourbon and moonshine tastings at 10:00 in the morning. (It is 5;00 somewhere, right?) Of course we ate BBQ and had an awesome time. We could have easily spent an extra couple of days here.

Next Up was Green Turtle Bay Marina. We did take the Cumberland River up to Lake Barkley, it was a longer trip, but we were assured that the lock would be MUCH quicker. The ride was beautiful, but we did not luck out at the lock, there was a big barge in the lock when we arrived and we were told it would be at least 2.5 hours before we could get in. It is always interesting holding position on a river with a 3 mile an hour current for 2.5 hours. But on the way, we also found out exactly why it is called Green Turtle Bay. We passed at least a dozen turtles sunning on the banks of the river. We are also starting to see the first signs of the fall colors that we have heard so much about.

We got into the marina and found out that we were in a 100 foot slip with our friends Carole and Glen on Encore. After a bunch of rearranging, bow in, stern in, move Encore up, move Patriot up, move BOTH boats up etc, we managed to get everyone plugged into power, Glen even had an extra foot of power cord to spare! Green Turtle was an awesome marina and we had a great time when we were there, but that will have to wait for our next installment.