December 10-13, 2022: We take a breather from our fast travel pace to wait for mail and handle some boat maintenance tasks.
(continued from Fulton (Midway) to Columbus, MS)
It started raining from almost the moment we arrived at Columbus Marina until almost the moment we left. But it was still nice to take a break from our constant travel pace. It was the first time we’d spent more than one night at a marina since leaving Green Turtle Bay.
The Mailed Check
I had originally planned to spend two nights at Columbus. I was waiting for mail — a rather large check I’d been expecting had been unexpectedly sent to my home in late November. It languished in a mail holding box at the post office until I was asked by the sender why I hadn’t cashed it. That resulted in a scramble to get my hands on it that involved a friend of a friend at the post office forwarding it to me at Columbus, MS.
She supposedly mailed it that Monday. We arrived in Columbus on Saturday and the envelope was not there.
It wasn’t there later that day, after the Saturday mail had been brought in, either.
This put me in a dilemma. There was no mail on Sunday. I was planning on leaving on Monday morning but the mail didn’t come until after 3 PM. So unless the mail carrier changed his/her route and delivered to the marina in the morning — extremely unlikely — we’d have to stick around until after 3 that day. That meant departing on Tuesday, with three nights at the marina.
Remember, the clock was ticking. We had to be in Mobile by December 19 so Alyse could catch her December 20 flight. It was doable even with an extra day at Columbus, but the more extra days we tacked on here or there, the harder we’d have to push later on to make it to Mobile on time.
Still, it seemed very likely the check would arrive with Monday’s mail. So we wound up staying the extra day.
Columbus Marina
I should say a few things about Columbus Marina.
It’s a relatively large marina tucked into a cove at the south end of Columbus Lake. It has a bunch of covered slips and a bunch of open ones. It also has a pretty good collection of what my friend Kim on Pony calls “ghost boats.” Those are boats in various stages of disrepair — or even partially sunken sometimes — that take up space at a marina. No one seems to care about them so they just sit there, usually with broken parts or, in the case of Columbus, green moss or mold growing on them. One of these boats was huge and parked right next to the marina’s main building. On our side, it looked brand new and ready to cruise. But on the side facing north, it was covered with that green growth. Very sad.
How sad is this? This gorgeous boat is just rotting away, tied up at Columbus Marina.
It’s a silly thing, but I love it when marina bathrooms use small cleats as hooks outside the shower.
The marina itself had all the features you’d expect at a full service marina. There was a ship’s store with basic parts and the usual collection of logo t-shirts. There was a laundry room. There were restrooms with showers. All this was in the main building, which was built high on pilings for when the area flooded. The docks were floating, too, which I really prefer over fixed docks. There was security on the docks, but that time of year there were very few people around.
We met a number of other Loopers while we were there. All were couples in larger boats than us. There was Bruce and Lea with their two dogs in New Bearings, a Nordic Tug 42. There was Spencer & Jill in Chasing This, a gorgeous 1964 Chris Craft. There was another boat, too, but I didn’t get a boat card so I can’t remember the names! These three boats left as a group on Monday morning and I remember looking at them longingly, wishing I could be on my way with them.
Before we left, Resolute glided in and Patrick in Endeavor was on his way.
What was cool about the marina staff is that they monitored the Nebo app so they knew exactly who was nearby and coming in — as long as they were on Nebo. I wish more marinas would do this.
View from the back of my boat at Columbus Marina the first night we were there.
Columbus, by the way, is where Kim and Ted in Pony had left the boat when they went to Texas (I believe) for Thanksgiving. And I’m pretty sure it’s where Connie and Michael had been in La Principessa when there were tornado warnings in the area. I’d heard so much about it that I felt as if I knew it.
Keeping Busy
We spent most of our time at Columbus doing chores like laundry, tidying up, and boat fixes. I still had a leak in the wall on the port side of the boat that reared its ugly head in the rain and we got plenty of rain to remind me it needed fixing.
I dreaded taking the wall apart again because it was such a bitch to get it back together, but Alyse kind of shamed me into it. I still couldn’t figure out exactly how the water was getting in. One theory was the vertical support for the rails on the upper deck, which went through the top part of the wall, not being sealed properly on the inside. A newer theory, introduced by the owner of Pappa Whiskey, who we’d met in Green Turtle Bay, was that it was getting in at the port side position light. I’d gone out on the gunwales to get a closer look at that and saw that the plastic tubing to protect the wires out there had its cut facing forward where water could get in.
I tried two fixes while we were at Columbus. The first was an inside fix in the wall: using duct tape to create a barrier to keep the water from getting in at the bottom of the porthole over the sink. This required me to remove the porthole and part of the wall, apply the tape, and then put everything back together.
Mother Nature gave me a good downpour afterwards which proved that the fix had been completely ineffective.
Next, I tried a fix on the outside, at the wiring for the port side position light. For that fix, I needed the boat moved to the other side of its wide slip and dry weather. It wound up being a Monday fix since since Monday started out dry. I pulled the boat out of the slip, took it over to the fuel dock, topped it off with fuel, pumped out its waste tank, and then parked it back where it was, but with the port side against the dock. That made it possible for me to get to the position light without standing on the super narrow gunwales as I worked. By this time, I was pretty fed up with the whole problem and just squirted a bunch of silicone sealant into the crack.
For a while, it seemed to work. But as time went on and the boat went through more heavy rain storms in subsequent days and weeks, it was pretty clear that it had not. To this day, the problem remains.
Trips Into Town
We took two trips into town and one of them wasn’t even into town.
The first trip was on Sunday morning, the day after we arrived. We went out to breakfast and then hit the local Walmart for a provision run. The marina had a courtesy car and since there were so few people at the marina, there wasn’t much competition to get our hands on it.
Breakfast was at the Up Down Eatery and Coffeehouse, which I can recommend. It was basically the closest restaurant to the marina (since the restaurant at the marina was closed for whatever reason). We sat inside and had coffee with eggs (me) and pastry (Alyse). Good food, decent prices.
There’s a Walmart and a Kroger supermarket nearby, and as much as I hate Walmart, that’s where we ended up. Why? Well, I needed more than just food items. My lists always include items that I need to get from a good hardware store or place like Walmart or Target. Rather than try to hit multiple stores, I just wind up in Walmart. Yes, the food is cheaper, but the shopping experience is generally pretty sucky and they don’t always have the brands I want.
But that’s part of the cruising lifestyle — finding easy solutions to problems. Problem: buying groceries and non-grocery items with limited time or transportation options. Solution: Walmart.
Anyway, we spent at least 30 minutes in Walmart gathering together the things we needed and checked out. Then we loaded up the car and went back to the marina, where it was (of course) raining. I found a marina cart, loaded it up, and got everything back to the boat. Then I went back out to the car and moved it back to its usual parking place. I was soaking wet when I got back to the boat.
Something about this prime rib didn’t impress me. Maybe because it had no flavor? The potato was excellent though!
The other trip into town that we made was on Monday. We went to a restaurant my friends had raved about: Harvey’s. It was nice to get into a semi-upscale restaurant for a change. I liked the brick decor and high ceilings of the repurposed space and the holiday lights made it cozy. It felt somehow pleasant to be among people of all ages, dressed nicely, with restaurant servers who might actually have had a clue about what they were doing. But in the end, I was disappointed with my prime rib dinner, although the potato and wine were pretty good.
We took a drive through town before heading back and I was immediately angry with myself for not coming into town during the day. Although all the shops were closed, there were definitely shops we could have visited for some off-boat time that didn’t involve a Walmart or eating. I don’t know why I didn’t research options in town earlier. I was even more annoyed when I discovered the next day that there was a museum in town for the Tenn-Tom Waterway. I definitely would have visited that had I known it existed.
But for some reason we had fallen into the trap of retreating to our own little world on the boat in the marina. Maybe it was because Alyse didn’t seem interested in checking out our surroundings and I had boat chores to do. I just assumed there was nothing to do or see. I was wrong.
This is actually some really nice sipping gin.
We did make one more stop that night before going back to the marina: we found a liquor store. For some reason, we had been going through unusually large quantities of vodka and gin. The store we found, which was in a strip mall between town and the marina, was run by a large, rather jolly man packing a Glock on his hip. He immediately realized that we weren’t the typical hooch buyers he probably saw and gave us some samples of various things he had open hand. That’s how I wound up with a bottle of locally distilled Dixie honey vodka and Alyse wound up with something similarly local to take home. A bottle of Gunpowder gin rounded out our purchases. (I apparently drink a lot less alone because I still have quite a bit left in the vodka and gin bottles with Alyse gone.)
Leaving Columbus
Did I mention that Monday’s mail didn’t bring the missing check either? Well, consider it mentioned. I don’t understand how a letter mailed at a post office by a postal service employee could take over a week to get halfway across the country. But that’s what was going on.
And we couldn’t afford to wait any longer.
So on Tuesday morning, bright and early, I called ahead to the lock, made sure they could lock us through without a wait, and headed out. It was December 13 and we now had a week to get to Mobile, AL.
(continued in Columbus, MS to Gainesville, AL (Tombigbee Oxbow Anchorage))
