Hennepin Revisited

Well we did attend St. Patricks church on Sunday, and it is a very old and beautiful church.

In the afternoon we decided to put the mast back up so that we would have an anchor light. As we raised it, there was some resistance, so we used a little extra muscle power and heard a "snap." It turned out to be the padeye that fastens to the top of the cabin to secure the starboard side stay. We had recently noticed that it was not the stainless steel we would have expected, and it turns out is is a bronze casting. The turnbuckle on the stay had kinked and twisted the eye of the padeye. The piece looks as if there was a defect in the casting. There is a black portion the casting that was probably a weak spot.

Although it was Sunday, we were able to order a stainless steel replacement with overnight delivery which would arrive before noon on Tuesday.

Nearly the whole day on Monday was spent in removing the broken padeye. It involved making a very ugly hole in the ceiling of the aft stateroom by chiseling through 2 inches of marine plywood.

We could then access the nuts to allow removal of the broken part.

Tuesday morning we fabricated blocks of plywood to fill the gap we had created. When the parts did arrive as avertised, it was fairly straightforward to install a replacement and put the interior pieces back in place.

While in Seneca, we made the acquaintance of a very interesting couple doing the loop in a 32 ft Grand Banks trawler. They live in Port Townsend, WA, where Traveller was purchased, and they shipped their boat from Tacoma, WA with the same shipper as was used for Traveller, our previous trawler, lost to Hurricane Ivan.

Jim is a commercial fisherman in Washington state, [with a docterate in fisheries], and Anita is a speech therapist [who used to own and operate her own commercial fishing boat!]

This morning we finally were able to leave Seneca, and we passed through the Marsielles, IL lock and the Starved Rock lock with out incident.

Starved Rock is a prominant historical landmark, where the Illinois Indian Nation was virtually wiped out by the supporters of Chief Pontiac who the Chief of the Illinois had injudicously stabbed to death.

The picture of Starved Rock is one of two that John missed today. The other was of a bald eagle snatching a fish from the the waters of the Illinois River. 0h well, we aren't National Geographic after all.

Tonight we are stopping at the free town dock at Hennepin,IL where John's brother, Jim, and his wife Rosemary stopped when the three of them brought Traveller down five years ago.

Somehow these two images of Hennepin don't seem to make up for the two we missed -- oh well.