Busted down in Davenport

This morning finds us tied up to a Sea Wall (River Wall?) in East Davenport, Iowa (aka the Quad Cities) while Captain and Chief Mechanic Steve has replaced our toasted water pump impeller. See photo on right: black pieces are the remains of the impeller blades which used to be attached to the center. This vital device keeps the fresh water flowing through and cooling the engine. So how, you ask, did this happen? The left photo of the cup filled with green stuff is not the latest yuppie salad ingredient, but is an algae that is prevalent in the river, and yesterday we went through a lock that was full of it. When we exited the lock, the engine overheated because the pump had sucked up algae which blocked the strainer and stopped the water from moving through the system. He removed this full cup of algae from the strainer at the time, and then worked on the whole system more at the marina last night and it was pumping water adequately, he thought. We were only a half mile out today, however, and the overheating occurred again, so this time, he had to dig deeper, and pulled the water pump out to find the toasted impeller. When the pump was without water flow, it ran dry, and that tears up the blades. Fortunately, all good boaters carry a couple of spare impellers, and we do have our ace mechanic aboard. All should be well shortly, putting the pump back in is a nasty job, in a small space with unreachable connections, but he's doin' it.

So you might have heard the old saying about boating being hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer panic and that's certainly been true for the last couple of days. The scenery has flattened out, the leaves are all still green, and the weather remains cloudy and very chilly. We've only anchored out twice so far, the marinas are reasonably priced and it's nice to have the electric so we can run the heat at night. We've heard too many CO poisoning stories about boaters who ran their generators at night to take a chance with that.

Yesterday, we took the bikes down for the first time and went on a grocery run. Of course, it was up a steep hill, but turned to be a fun trip and the exercise felt great. The little baskets on the bikes are very nifty. We've got more food aboard than we left with, but when you can get a good burger, fries, cokes and watch part of the Twins for $12, like we did last night, what the heck. We've cooked on the boat only twice and all the NEW wonderful galley ware works great and it's fun to work down there. Steve is learning more about the navigation software every day. I think we're holding up okay, but some warm weather would really help.

The pump is in now, and it just started snowing !!!! I'll be going out on the bow soon as we are right upstream from Lock 15, so I'll close for now and get on my parka. Miss ya'll !!!