Rolling on the river....bent prop and all

I started out the day yesterday with an interesting and memorable experience at Hoppies. The big river had risen from 10 to 15 feet following record rainfall in the area from the recent hurricane. I was the lead boat on the barge wall with 3 loopers behind me and other local boats behind them. we spent the entire day before watching debris build in the river and then float by at Hoppies (a real piece of Americana)

Fern told us about the river coming up and suggested we flush our props by bumping them in reverse a few times and then doing a reverse flush to clear anything in them. We went back to our boats from the meeting and alread had debris collecting in my bow along the barge. We pushed out the boats and let the junk flush by and I pulled in my bow to collect less branches, etd. That seemed to work as we did not collect any additional debris up front.

I was very concerned about traveling the next leg of 110 miles with all the trees, branches and siht floating by so I caught a local warming up his diesels and he was headed upstream. Based on his guidance we decided to hit the water.

When I did the bump on my engines, one of those 3208 CAT's stopped as we heard a clunk under the boat!!! We had cut a 4 inch branch with our prop and saw both pieces float between the boats. Restarted the engines and everything seemed to work. Pushed out into the current and tons of debris to head down the river. Things seemed okay......

......later when powering up, we noticed a vibration in our prop. Checked everything down below again and no leaks, hot spots or vibrations at our slow cruising speed....so we just kept going.

Interesting day....from Hoppies we had a lot of trees and detritis from humanity for most of the day. We anchored at Little Diversion Channel and watched the debris catch up with us overnight as the canal filled and the waters rose a few feet. Nice quiet anchorage....we were joined by a new 58 Tiara on a delivery?

Anyway....back to the dodge 'em game as we go to the Ohio today...another long day limping along.
We will pull and repair tuesday....all being well!