After a great, long, and draining weekend, I don't have it in me to write anything of my own. So here's photos I took, along with Conner's words below, taken from our travel blog.
Day 100 November 27
100 miles 14.5 hours
In the morning the weather cleared up and we were prepared to barge it hard. Our whole morning was spent going through the New Orleans metropolitan area.
There were a bunch of rubberneckers in New Orleans staring and waving at us from the shore. We were having fun yelling at them from our boat. We wanted to get more rubberneckers so I steered us closer to the bank. We yelled at them again "EY!"... then we got stuck! Now they really had a reason to rubberneck. We pushed our boat for about 15 minutes while crowds of people gathered. It was pretty frustrating seeing paddlewheelers and barges parked just 30 meters from where we were and then we still run aground. I guess gino did warn us about those sandbars though.
Its especially surprising because the stretch of river from NOLA to the gulf the water is over 100 feet deep. People warned us about bull sharks that come in from the ocean and live in the river... Bull shark? More like bull shit!!
Once we passed New Orleans most of the traffic died. Now it is exclusively ships with small tows here and there. Gino recommended a spot for us to stay for the night, but this was our last stretch and with 50 miles left. The current picked up, the river straightened out, a tailwind started blowing… we decided to barge.
It was some seriously great sailing. Tailwind, on a run, and with a straight shot down river we didn’t have to trim the sails too much.
At about 5:30 the sun went down and it started to get dark--really dark. Once the sun completely set it was pitch black. There was no moon and not many other lights. The only thing we had were flashing channel markers which were each miles apart.
It was really starting to play with our minds a bit. All we could see were random dots of light in the distance. We would see some lights and wouldn't realize what it was until it was up right next to us. "Oh, its a ship". We couldn’t tell what it was or how large it was. We couldn't even tell if it was moving or not, and if it was moving in what direction or how fast.
We wanted to just stay by the shoreline, but we got out of the channel and got stuck on a sandbar once, plus there were random obstacles sticking out of the water near the shore.
Four hours of darkness later, we finally made it to our final destination: Venice! Not only did we complete the trip, we also broke the 100-mile-in-a-day mark that we've been trying to do the whole trip. 100 miles on day #100, how ironic. Our new favorite number: one-hundred! Because Venice is the last city on the river it has earned the nickname "The end of the world"
From Venice there is still another 10 miles of river down to the "Head of Passes". The Head of Passes is the 0-mile point of the Lower Mississippi and where the main stem of the river branches off into three directions at its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico.
We could have gone the last 10 miles, but the last accessible road and sign of civilization is in Venice. What were we going to do, float out into the ocean? Then what? We heard how people go down then can't get back up because of the current and have to get rescued. Besides my dad was already there waiting for us with the boat trailer.
We each shot off a flare for celebration... just like we told the Quad-Cities media we would do.
Someone spotted our flare and began talking about us on the VHF radio, we told them everything was alright and continued into the marina. Just as we entered a coast guard boat showed up to see what the emergency was. We told them "we were lost". They seemed to think nothing of it and proceeded to inspect our boat for violations. They noticed that our navigation lights weren't working. We thought they were on the whole time but the only one working was the stern light. We successfully just navigated the last 40 mile stretch of river at night with NO lights on our boat. Whatever, the skies were clear and the stars were beautiful.
My dad welcomed us at the marina to find us being towed in by the coast guard. Luckily the coast guard didn’t give us any tickets and congratulated us on our journey instead. When we got back to the lodge my dad booked for us we shotgunned 32oz "giant cans" of Colt 45, then puked them up... for celebration!
