At Green Turtle Bay

---

December 3-5, 2022: We get a lot done during a restful stay at a quality marina.

---

(continued from Paducah to Grand Rivers, KY)

We spent two nights at Green Turtle Bay Resort and Marina and got a lot of chores done during that time.

Cleaning Up

First on the agenda were showers and laundry. Yes, the boat has a shower and hot water, but it was low on water because I hadn’t been able to top off the fresh water tank since Grafton, IL. Every other facility that had water between there and Grand Rivers, KY had their water turned off for the winter. So not only were we filling our toilet tank but we were emptying our fresh water tank. (The toilet uses water from whatever body of water we’re in to flush so it doesn’t affect fresh water supplies.)

Green Turtle Bay had an excellent shower setup with individual single-person bathrooms. You go in, you close the door, and it was just like being in a bathroom at someone’s house — everything was right there for you. I think hitting the showers is the first thing Alyse and I did after tying up the boat.

Laundry was next. I wasn’t desperate to do laundry, but I had run out of long-sleeved shirts. It was so damn cold! Way colder than I’d expected. The laundry room was adjacent to the bathrooms and both were less than 50 feet from the boat. I wasted no time getting a load going.

I also did some general cleaning around the boat. I might have even taken out the vacuum. I know I put away the paper plates that I’d bought solely to minimize dishwashing when our water supply was in danger of running out.

The Windlass is Fixed!

I was pleasantly surprised to find ourselves parked next to another Ranger Tug R-31, Pappa Whiskey. The owner, GT, and I got to chatting and I asked him about the problems I was having with my windlass. Did he know what might be wrong?

“Sure,” he said. “You need to use that wrench that came with the boat to tighten it. Do you have the wrench?”

Before I could look in a spot where I thought it might be, he’d produced his. He climbed up onto the bow of my boat, stuck the wench into the appropriate spot, and turned it.

“There you go,” he said. “Should work fine now. If you don’t have the wrench, you can order it from Lewmar.”

Lewmar is the company that makes the windlass. Later I looked in the spot I thought it might be and sure enough, it was there, still in its plastic bag. It had never been used. For the first time in a while, I looked forward to anchoring out.

We didn’t really get much time to talk to GT and KJ on Pappa Whiskey. They headed out the very next day. A quick look at Nebo today (nearly two months later) shows that they’re still in Demopolis on the Tombigbee River — they’ve probably taken a break from their Looping.

A Trip into Town

We needed some groceries and were told that there was a courtesy car we could borrow. So we went into town. There wasn’t much there. The big attraction was apparently a tourist attraction/restaurant called Patti’s 1880s Settlement. Everyone we talked to about Green Turtle Bay told us that we had to go to Patti’s. Sadly, I could not get reservations. We did drive by, though. It looked like a place for tourists.

We stopped at the Village Market & Cafe, a small grocery store that served the community. I think Alyse was disappointed; I suspect she wanted me to drive us to Paducah where there was a Walmart, but we really didn’t need that much in the way of groceries and this little store had what we needed. Alyse also wanted to get some liquor — several days on the rivers was taking a toll on my meager supply of vodka and gin — but because it was a Sunday morning, the adjacent liquor store was closed. Since the situation would be the same in any liquor store around there on a Sunday morning, we skipped it and went back to the marina.

Christmas Spirit

With less than three weeks until Christmas, the marina was decked out in Christmas lights, including lights on the masts of most of the sailboats. It was festive at night.

There was a yacht club on the premises and our dock fees covered temporary membership. That means we could eat at the restaurant there — and go to the “party” for members on Sunday night. Alyse didn’t want to go, but I did. So after dinner, I walked up there, expecting to find a party. What I found was a restaurant full of people having dinner at tables and a sad buffet of snack food that looked like it had been out for a few hours and picked over pretty good. I took a seat at the bar and ordered a Moscow Mule. I also made the mistake of ordering some bar food — fried something. It was a mistake because right after I ordered it, the bartender left so she could participate in a Secret Santa thing that was being emceed on the dance floor. I was ready to go when the food finally arrived and it definitely had not been worth waiting for. I asked the server for my check at the same time and it took another 15 minutes to arrive. In all, it was not my best bar experience.

The one thing I really liked about the yacht club restaurant were the boat name signs. There were dozens of them and I have to assume they all corresponded to members’ boat names.

Zip the Volvo Guy

I had an appointment with Zip, the Volvo mechanic I’d called when I got that error message on my boat’s engine computer. I wanted him to update the Volvo operating system software, which had never been done since the boat was new. (I had taken care of the Garmin system stuff in Anacortes in September before shipping the boat to Chicago in October.) I knew now that the “engine problem” I had was really a battery problem and wanted him to test the batteries.

And this is where everything went to hell.

We lifted the engine lid, as well as the lid to the compartment adjacent to where the four house batteries and engine battery are installed. None of the batteries are exposed; they’re all kind of shoved under the deck where the outside refrigerator is. You can easily see the first two and you can see the terminals for the two behind them. After that, well, it’s difficult to see anything, even with a flashlight.

Ranger Tugs does not make it easy to install or check the house and engine batteries in it R-29 boats. They’re shoved into a tight space under the outside refrigerator.

Zip found a thick yellow wire coming out of the engine and had me wiggle it while he looked into the battery compartment. “Well, there’s your problem right there,” he said in his thick southern drawl. (Everyone we met in Kentucky had a southern drawl.) “You don’t have a separate engine battery. Your engine is wired right into the house batteries.”

I was shocked. The manual — and the surveyor’s report that had cost me $1200 — clearly said there were five batteries under there and, try as I might, I could only see four. He was telling me flat out that there were only four.

(This led to a two-week ordeal where I tried to get information about my setup from Ranger Tugs and kept hitting a wall. The reason it went on for two weeks: I was 2 time zones away and I was traveling on most days so I couldn’t be reached. The person I was dealing with via email did not seem to understand the situation — as Zip reported to me — and was not giving me the answers I needed. More on all this in a later post.)

While I’m sure Zip would have loved to sell me four or five new batteries, I needed answers first. And I wasn’t willing to stay put in Green Turtle Bay while he waited for the right batteries to arrive. This turned out to be a GOOD THING, as I’ll explain in another blog post.

Next, he hooked up his computer to a port on my engine and began the software update progress. It kept restarting and turning on and off and he seemed sort of puzzled but then assured me that “sometimes it does that.” Meanwhile, other boaters at the dock — including the folks who had arrived in Pappa Whiskey’s spot about an hour after they left that morning — were wanting Zip to do things for them. Finally, he said he was finished and I fired up the Volvo system and started the engine. It started right up because we were connected to shore power. I nearly dropped dead when he told me I owed him $350 because I had to pay for his travel time from Illinois but he was only charging me half of that because he was doing work for someone else and he’d pay the other half. I wrote him a check. (Much later, I’d wish I’d stopped the check before he cashed it.)

Time to Move On

On Monday morning, when Zip was finished and on to the next boat, we were ready to move on. We’d had our rest and a small dose of warm weather before it began getting cold again. I felt a real need to put northern miles behind us and get to a place where the weather would be warm all the time.

And now I had a new problem to worry about: the missing engine battery. The sooner I got someplace where there was a Ranger Tug mechanic, the better off I’d be.