Susan and I arrived at the boat Thursday afternoon, May 30, to load our gear and most of the provisions for our proposed two-week cruise off the Mississippi Gulf Coast before we headed for a grocery store to complete provisioning. Anatoly the Anole (which is pronounced "anolee," by the way) was already aboard, and didn't go along on the shopping expedition.

Below is a chart showing the extent of our cruise, with red A's where we anchored.

We pulled out of the slip early Friday morning and headed for an anchorage just outside The Rigolets, about four hours closer to the Mississippi coast. The next closest anchorage along the way was another five or six hours, which would make for a long day, and besides, I thought the fishing might be good at this closer anchorage. There's a burned-out oil platform in the horseshoe just off the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW), and ample depth. The only drawback we knew of ahead of time was a railroad track some hundred yards away. We learned of additional drawbacks, although none that prevent this location from being a prime anchorage with excellent protection from all directions.

One of the additional drawbacks was apparent right away - there was a high tidal current. Shortly after realizing there was a high current, we realized by trying to anchor that the bottom was also soft. We did get the anchor to hold, finally, then got up the awnings, and then, after a brief rest from the hard work of putting up the awnings, we loaded up the dinghy to go catch some live bait for fishing. There looked to be a good place to catch bait with my new seine a short distance away, where a little stream meandered into the grassy island we were anchored to. Motoring over to the spot in the dinghy, and killing the outboard before I could run it aground and break the shear pin, I checked the depth with an oar. Finding it about knee-deep I asked Susan to jump overboard to hold the dinghy before the current could sweep us back out; I'd follow as soon as I got the motor tilted in. Well, the bottom may have started only knee deep, but about that softness I mentioned earlier.... Susan went into the bottom past her knees, so she was more than waist deep overall. I followed quickly with the same result. We then struggled to get closer to the grass, where I thought the footing would be better. I was wrong about that, too, but didn't admit it until we'd struggled for some time with the seine. Susan commented that we were reinacting the leech scene from The African Queen, fortunately without the leeches. We caught a large number of tiny minnows of no use to us at all. Finally giving the spot up as hopeless, we struggled back to the dinghy and motored to a sandy beach just the other side of the ICW.

From that sandy beach we managed to catch about half a dozen minnows large enough to put on a hook for bait. That was when we discovered that we'd got out the minnow bucket, but hadn't managed to actually get it into the dinghy. I found a soft drink can to put the minnows in, and we started back to the boat. The outboard cranked easily, having just been run, but there was no go to it. We'd broken a shear pin, apparently just from the stress of the prop being put into gear. Meanwhile the current was still swift, and we were unlikely to be able to paddle hard enough to avoid being swept down the ICW, past the up-current entrance to our anchorage loop. I might have been able to replace the shear pin if I'd tried, since I did have a replacement pin and also my Swiss Army knife to help with the cotter pin, but there was a bait shrimper right there who responded to my wave. He towed us back to the boat, accepting neither monetary payment nor a cold beer. I managed with some difficulty, including a frozen outboard clamp that remains to be taken care of as I write this, to eventually replace the shear pin. While we put the minnows into the minnow bucket as soon as we got back to the boat, they'd all died along the way. We caught nothing with our dead live bait.

Arising well after sunup Saturday morning, we headed out for my favorite Mississippi anchorage off Horn Island, arriving around 4 PM.

The water around Horn Island was beautiful. I've seen it clear before, but never this clear inside Mississippi Sound. Once we got the awnings up we changed into our swim suits and went for a dip to cool off. The water felt great, and I could see my feet and the bottom of the boat's rudder clearly. This was offshore-clear. Sometimes there are quite a few jellyfish in this area, but I saw only one on the trip over, and we saw none in the water where we were anchored. Later, on the beach, we saw none of the stingrays that sometimes congregate there in profusion. Back in the boat after cooling off and cleaning up, we fixed frozen margaritas and sat in the shaded cockpit watching the dolphins that had come into the area to feed. I tried to get pictures of the dolphins, but the best I could manage showed only a fin or two.

We spent Sunday relaxing, except for a trip to the beach to seine some bait. While there I also discovered a genuine Borden's milk crate in pristine condition, which I added to the boat's complement. Back on the boat we sat around working crosswords, playing Scrabble, and watching the cork with the baited hook beneath it. The live bait continued to disappear at regular intervals throughout the day, but I never saw a bite. Dumb fish.

Monday we dropped the awnings, pulled the hook, and set out through Dog Keys Pass so that Susan could see the real Gulf waters. The water in the sound was so clear that the outside was unable to surpass it enough to be noticeable, but she has now seen real Gulf water. We motored around a freighter anchored out behind Ship Island, waiting to be called into Gulfport for loading. During that trip I did manage to catch one Spanish mackerel, which we ate that evening for dinner. That was the only fish caught during the entire cruise. We returned to our anchorage at Horn Island for the evening.

Tuesday, June 4 we motored to the west end of West Ship Island to see Fort Massachusetts. It was a hot day, but not hopelessly hot for the endeavor. Fort Massachusetts is a small brick fort completed in 1859, already obsolete by virtue of being built from brick, but still interesting to see. A 15-inch Rodman cannon was mounted on top of the fort, with the remains of a second one at a similar mount nearby. I thought I was seeing a cannon that had blown up in firing, but found out later from a volunteer guide that it had been blown up on purpose nearly 100 years ago by someone who had bought the gun for scrap metal. These guns shot projectiles weighing in the neighborhood of 400 pounds, using powder charges around 100 pounds, both of which seem incredible to me for the time. We also had chili dogs at the snack bar, following up with ice cream.

While anchoring near the fort, we discovered Hank Sonnier's boat, Manatee, three slips down from ours when at home in Slidell. He dinghied by a little after we anchored, and we chatted awhile. He came by again while we were cooling off in the water, following our foray ashore, and passed along an invitation to dinner from a raft-up of boats nearby. These folks were either from Marina Del Ray, where Hank and I had kept our boats formerly, or had recently moved from there, and were cruising together. Susan and I dinghied over after our dip to a delicious dinner of barbecued chicken.

Wednesday morning we pulled anchor and set out for Point Cadet Marina in Biloxi, planning to stay two nights. We were set to enjoy unlimited water for showers, clean laundry, air conditioning, and a couple of trips to casino buffets. We were also set to visit the commercial fishing museum there, and maybe to drop by Pitalo's Hardware, a fine old marine chandlery. Well, it seems there was a fishing tournament, and no slips were to be available through the weekend. Now that was a blow. We could probably find a slip at Gulfport, Longbeach, or Pass Christian, where we'd enjoy showers and air conditioning. We might even find a laundry. But we wouldn't find a museum and chandlery in walking distance. I expected we wouldn't find much of anything within walking distance. So we decided we'd just head back home. We elected to anchor at Cat Island some three hours out of Biloxi for the night, finding high winds from the east and building chop by the time we got there. We had good protection from the east, though, as evidenced by the fact that by late afternoon all the shrimp boats in the world were anchored right there with us. Susan said it looked like D-Day, and indeed it did bear some resemblance. We spent the afternoon relaxing, doing a lot of reading. Susan was impressed by the gear in the other half of the Captain's berth, shown below, along with the Captain. That gear included not only the fishing rods that are peeking out, but also a small TV, a cold-weather sleeping bag, a laptop computer bag, a digital camera and accessories, a soft suitcase, and two jackets. Everything has to go somewhere.

We dropped the awnings late Wednesday to save time getting underway the next morning. This turned out to be advantageous in another way, too, as it rained that night. Ordinarily the awnings might keep the rain out of the forward hatch, so that Susan wouldn't have known it was raining. As it was, she didn't realize it until water had soaked some places in her bunk. The Captain isn't likely to get rain in the face, and didn't, and didn't wake up, and Susan didn't wake him to help, so she took care of closing hatches and portholes on her own. Anyway, by 6:30 Thursday morning we had the hook up and were headed out. We hadn't gone far when we ran into more rain. We finally ran out of it about an hour later, drying off maybe another hour later than that. We watched a lot of rain on the remainder of the trip, but managed to miss all of it. We did get a picture of a rainbow, though.

We arrived back in the slip in Slidell around 2 PM. That was where we encountered the most serious problem of the cruise. The holding tank vent line was plugged, and it took several hours to get it unplugged, partly because the water line to the marina was under repair and we spent much of that time with no water pressure at the slip. It was a relief when I managed to poke a wire tie through the plug near the outlet and heard the gas pressure release. Foul as it was, it almost smelled sweet. Shortly after that, when water pressure was restored, we got substantial water flow out the vent cap. The problem of the frozen clamp on the outboard remains to be taken care of. Overall, though, this was one of the most trouble-free cruises I've made. Anyway, after showering with unlimited water we drove into Slidell for supper, then returned to the boat where we slept in air- conditioned comfort for the first time in a week. The next morning, Friday, we washed the boat down thoroughly, loaded our stuff in the van, and returned to our homes. Except for Anatoly, who we presume is on continued bug-watch on board Mariposa, back in his home waters after a vacation trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The following is the cruise from Susan's point of view.

Hi, Everyone,

Mike and I got back yesterday from our cruise to the Mississippi Coast. I, for one, had a great time, and found time to relax, catch up on my sleep, and take time to appreciate the beauty of nature. And, of course, to enjoy very good company.

Mike picked me up in New Orleans at noon on Thursday, May 30, in the middle of a hard rain. His 20 year old van seems to have picked up some water, because it chose to quit once or twice between my house and Lee's Hamburgers, where we went for lunch.

However, after that, it seems to have dried out and all was well, and we made it to the boat slip in Slidell with no further mishaps. Mike had assembled a fuel polisher (no, it doesn't make the diesel shine, it cleans out any accumulated crud that has managed to find its way into the fuel tank.) We got all our gear on board, saw to it that the air conditioner was running, then let the fuel polisher do its work all night while we went shopping for supplies and then went out for dinner.

We got a fairly early start on Friday, but knew we were headed only to Catfish Point, just to the east of the Rigolets railway bridge, about three or so hours away. We got there with a strong current, which made anchoring harder than usual, then set off to catch bait. You understand that all this is new to me. We lowered the dinghy, and motored over to a marshy island close to the boat. Mike said that he had thought about changing to his bathing suit but decided not to, so I didn't either. We got to the island, Mike stuck an oar down to the bottom, and declared that the water was about knee high, so we bailed out of the dinghy. Whoosh!!! Down into the bottomless pit of schlucky mud, up to our chests. Well, what are you gonna do? Laugh, scream, get mad? We chose to laugh pretty hard. Meanwhile, we had this two person seine that we dragged along with us, getting nowhere, mainly because every step that we stepped took us down, down, down into the mire. If someone had happened by with a camera, it would have made a great scene.

Well, after about 20 or so minutes of this foolishness, we managed to schluck ourselves back to the dinghy and motor around the bend to this little sandy beach where the Intercoastal (ICW) comes through, and there we were able to catch a few minnows. But oops! We had forgotten to bring the minnow bucket to put any bait into. Mike found an abandoned Coke can and we stuck the unfortunate fish in that and headed back for the boat.

Uh, oh. We broke a shear pin. We were quite a long way from the boat, the current was really swift, and there was no way we could paddle against it to get back to the boat. But as luck would have it, a fisherman came along and gave us a tow back to Mariposa, and he also refused to accept any payment, even a cold beer.

The fish were long dead by the time we put them on the hook, and we had no fish for dinner that night. But what an adventure! Now next year, when we study Louisiana, I can tell my kids exactly what a marsh is like. Before, it was only book learning.

The next morning we slept until well after daybreak, which is hard to do because the hatches and portholes let in a lot of sunlight. We went to Horn Island with very little misadventures, except for the minor detail of the computer chart program suddenly stopping working, or the computer itself malfunctioning, I don't remember which, and we had to resort to the definitely non-techie method of reading paper charts. That was fine, and I was having fun reading them, but the channel marker numbers on the chart didn't match the numbers on the markers we were seeing. Minor detail. Somehow, being in sight of the coast gave us (sort of) the landmarks we needed, and we managed to stay in deep water all the way to Horn Island, where we anchored for the evening about 4:00 that afternoon.

Now you may think that once a person "sets the hook" that all the work is done. Nope. There are these awnings that need to be put up if you want to have any extra protection from the heat. They really do make a huge difference, but it takes some doing. Anyway, we got them up, then went for a dip, and had a relaxing evening. That might be the night we played Scrabble. I was off to a great head start, and high hopes of actually winning for a change, but it wasn't to be. Some people manage to draw the Q toward the end of the game, have a U already, and be able to find a great very high scoring place to put it. Oh, I say, where is the justice in this world? Anyway, as usual, Mike won. And, no, I don't "let" him win. We Harrises have always played for blood. It's just that it's usually mine that gets shed.

The next morning we dinghied to shore (this time remembering to take along needle nose pliers in case another shear pin broke), and went seining up and down, and caught quite a few bait fish. We also remembered the minnow bucket. The water was really beautiful--the prettiest I have ever seen it off the Mississippi Coast. Well, the rod was out, the bait was plentiful, but no luck catching anything. We also managed to do very little else except read and doze off. All in all, it was a great day.

The next day we went out into the Gulf beyond the barrier islands, but the water wasn't any prettier than it was on the other side of the islands. But I did get to see the Gulf. We did manage to hook one Spanish mackerel, which became dinner.

On Tuesday we decided to go over to Ship Island, and when we got to our anchorage, what did we see but Manatee, Hank Sonnier's boat. Hank lives on his boat at the marina where Mike keeps Mariposa, and he is a free spirit, and very nice and friendly. Hank saw us, dinghied over, and we visited for awhile, then we dinghied into shore, got a fine lunch at the Ship Island snack bar (chili dawgs), then went to visit Fort Massachusetts. For you Harrises, you know what it was like visiting an old fort with Daddy. Well, think about visiting a fort with a mechanical engineer who loves military history. It was great. Daddy and Mike would have made a great pair touring Civil War battlefields. Many similarities, but also some real differences in outlook. Then when we thought we were finished, the volunteer guide, who was hungry for takers, also showed us around, pointing out things I would never have noticed.

We had had enough bright sun and heat, and went back to Mariposa to rest. About 6:00, we were taking our daily swim when Hank rowed by, saying that we were invited to dinner with his friends on the rafted boats nearby. We thought we'd just go by and say hello, but we stayed for a delicious dinner. I had a bottle of wine aboard, and brought that, so I didn't feel too terribly bad about intruding.

I have to say, on the water, people are as friendly and considerate as they can be. You get the feeling they would do anything to help if you got in trouble, as you know you would do for them. It's really a nice feeling in this day and age of being suspicious of our fellow men.

Well, on Wednesday, we decided it was time to motor into Point Cadet, at Biloxi, to check into the marina there, which has real showers, laundry facilities, and is close to museums and restaurants. Hah! A fishing rodeo was going on, and there were no slips available. We thought about the options, and decided to just leisurely head on back to Slidell. We went to Cat Island, and anchored there around lunchtime, and put up the awnings in a blowing wind, which made for some excitement. Cat Island is really pretty from a distance. We didn't get any closer because it would have been a long, wet dinghy ride to shore, and we didn't even consider it. We just stayed on board and bummed around. Aah, what a life!

Also, at Cat Island, many shrimp boats came in to anchor for the evening. I told Mike that it looked like D-Day, with all the boats. He counted 47 shrimp boats. All right, so there were more on D-Day. But you get the picture.

I have to tell you that sitting offshore, looking up at the sky, or looking over the water, is such a wonderfully relaxing experience. Where else would I take the time to spend half an hour just watching and taking it all in? I wouldn't trade those times for anything.

Well, that reverie was spoiled in the middle of the night when I felt water dripping on my face, and realized that it was raining. The bow berth has an overhead hatch and three portholes, so I got up, closed things all around the boat, then went back to bed, but by then the bed had wet places and I was wet in places, and it wasn't so relaxing. Captain Mike managed to sleep through the whole thing. He told me later I should have told him to get up and help, but heck, I couldn't have been a martyr then, could I? Unfortunately, he had his cell phone under one of the portholes, and it got wet. He thinks it's ok now. I hope so.

We woke up early and were headed out by 6:30. About 7:00 it started to rain, and we had to pull out the foul weather jackets, but that rain ended soon, with no bad side effects other than us having wet shorts all morning. We had the current going with us, and we were back at the slip in Slidell by 1:00. We worked some in the afternoon, which was hard because the water was shut off for part of the afternoon, but got many of the post-cruise chores done. We had a nice dinner in Slidell, then came back and crashed early. We got up Friday morning, washed down the boat, and headed for home.

I'm still swaying back and forth a little. But for this soul who at age 13 got queasy on the ferry from Gulfport to Ship Island, I now can boast of having sea legs (I hope). I think I'm ready to tackle the Chesapeake in July.

First Mate and Galley Slave,

mikebiggs02@earthlink.net