DAY 4 - October 5, 2023

The daily blog is a brief overview of our activities on that day. Ultimately we hope to produce a summary video every week, once we are actually on America's Great Loop.

All photos can be clicked on for larger versions.

I began my day IN THE RIVER. We have a bow thruster and a stern thruster. These are used to move the boat side to side for docking. The bow thruster (in front) quit working yesterday. I thought fishing line may have gotten caught in the propellor of the thruster, so I needed to reach into the thruster tunnel. In order to do this we "beached" the boat at a sandy edge of the river. I jumped off the back of the boat and swam up to shore where I could stand on the sandy bottom and reach into the thruster tunnel. As it turns out, the propellor turned freely. I thought the shear pin connecting the thruster motor to the propellor shaft might have broken, but it turns out the motor isn't even running. So, I have a problem for now that I need to figure out how to fix. But that won't prevent us from continuing our trip. 

After my dip in the river, the rain began and continued the entire day. It wasn't heavy, but was continuous. Even as I'm writing this blog close to midnight, it's still raining.

We continue to see lots of businesses along the river, like this gravel operation.

We hope to feature one animal each week in our blogs or videos. This week's animal isn't wild or exotic. Our ANIMAL OF THE WEEK is simply cows hanging out by the Ohio River.

One of the places I wanted to stop, is Derby, Indiana. It's not very large, but has a friendly restaurant and little grocery store.

Our friends in the restaurant were having a beer to prepare for upcoming Halloween activities.

After the restaurant we picked up some needed supplies at The Derby General Store. The gentleman working there offered us free tomatoes. He said if we picked them from his garden out back, we could have as many as we wanted. He even gave us a tray of about fifty cherry tomatoes he already picked.

We ended our travel day at Perry Marine Service which is near Cannelton, Indiana and about a mile from our next lock. It was a standard $28.00 to tie up, which included an electric hook-up. In the video Denise is sautéing red peppers to go with chicken fajitas.

Today we traveled 47.5 miles.