Sometimes Things Don’t GO as Planned

 Lakefield And Buckhorn

Going thru the Peterborough Lift Lock took quite a bit of time. Lakefield was only a nine mile cruise but it involved 4 additional locks. We made it to Lakefield about 4 pm and decided to post up for the night. We all jumped into the canal to cool off and then enjoyed a shore dinner with the crew of Charlie Girl and Taylored For Two. After dinner we decided to take a stroll into town. On the way I heard a engine noise that I heard as a kid. I thought that sounds like a tractor pull. So I convinced the crew to follow the noise and sure enough we stumbled across a tractor/truck pull. What a blast.  

Nobody wanted to spent the $20 bucks per head to go in because it only had an hour to go. So we poked around and found a fence behinds the bleachers where we could see the the pull. Some of our crew had never seen one so I had to be the announcer so they got the idea. It was a hoot and holler!. On the way back Chris and I went to the lower side of the lock to check on a houseboat Bachelor Party of 30 sometings.

Well they invited on board and immediately out beers in our hands. It was hard to get away but we managed. The next morning we new we had weather moving in on us so we headed out at 8 am bound for the Lovesick lock. It was only 3 locks away but it went though another one of those incredible cruising grounds with a lot of windy channels and speckled with small pine tree rocky islands.

We chose Lovesick based on the when thunderstorms were projected to move in. Sue and I also came to the realization that unfortunately the prop repair we had done in Kingston was not good enough. We definitely had some vibration at certain RPMS. For those of you not familiar with prop vibration, a little bit can cause damage to other components like transmissions and bearing if you travel long distances.

 

We still have over 4000 miles to go so we needed to take care of it now. I knew that there was prop shop in Buckhorn that was top knothole at prop work. So we made the decision to pull into Buckhorn and have them pull the boat and rework the props. I spoke to the owner and explained our situation and he offered to pull us and eval the props. I heard they were known for being excellent.

The weather that was supposed to move in never did so we broke off from our group and went to the prop shop’s fuel dock. They said they would pull us in the morning and take a look. We no sooner got thru the Buckhorn lock and the skies opened up. Fortunately it was short lived so we were able to get to the dock without getting soaked. We had docktails with another Looper boat that was there waiting on parts so they could be on their way. The next morning the owner came down and gave us some bad news. We were too big for them to haul us out of the water. UGH! Now what do we do?