The Day After

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAY 191 - October 8. 2017

It is not as though there was no Hurricane Nate, we saw many cities on the TV news with flooded streets. It's just that while we were sleeping it either totally missed us or passed over us with no perceptible effects. The worst part, it turns out, was all the anxiety in the days leading up to last night!

So we got busy putting things back together.  

First I moved the boat back to the starboard finger pier so getting on and off was not an exercise in broad jumping. Then we had to remember how the pieces of that jigsaw puzzle that is our camperback fit together.  Fortunately, after 12 years we can pretty much look at each piece and it will come to us where it goes with a minimum of wrong guesses! Then the kayak had to be pulled out and put back up on top. Finally, all the stuff in the cockpit had to be put back where it goes for cruising instead of for potential hurricanes. 

We started talking with other Loopers about their plans to depart. tomorrow morning.  We will at least start out with Cecil and Danny on Desperado, and a couple of other boats. We'll aim to be on the river cruising toward the Demopolis Lock by 7 a.m.

Now the fun part. We had become friends with Rico who was on our dock at Kingfisher Marina on a 25 foot sailboat. I don't know Rico's last name, and I can't remember the name of his boat. I don't know all of Rico's story, but his daughter and 14 year old grandson live in Oregon, but he has spent the last 14 years with his mother in Tennessee because she asked him to, and he felt the need to honor her wishes.  But now he is on his way back to Oregon. When he gets to Mobile, the rest of us will turn left for Florida, but Rico will turn right for Texas for Galveston. We are not sure how but somehow he plans to get himself and his sailboat back to Oregon.

So what it the fun part, you ask? Well, Rico was standing on our finger pier saying how he admired the C-Dory and really like the name Daydream. Patty asked him if he had ever seen the movie The Scarlet Pimpernel. Rico replied "You mean the 1982 version with Anthony Andrews and Jane Seymour?" The movie is about an English nobleman, Sir Percy Blakeney, who through clever disguises and guile is on a mission to save the French noblemen, many of whom were innocent of any wrong doing, from madame la guillotine This is the premise of the movie, not a comment on the French Revolution! His symbol was a scarlet pimpernel, which Sir Percy describes as "but a humble English flower."

Apparently he had!  In fact, it is on his computer, and, like us, he has watched it over and over...and in his case, over and over some more! He instantly understood why our boat is named Daydream - it is from the pivotal scene in the movie where Chauvelin (Ian McKellen) and Sir Percy (Anthony Andrews) have just had a duel which Sir Percy of course won but he declined to kill Chauvelin. Chauvelin points out that there is no escape, his men are guarding the causeway which is the only way off the island castle.

We are pretty sure that there is not another human alive on this planet who knows ALL the dialog from The Scarlet Pimpernel as well as we do. Rico gave us Sir Percy's reply: "Ah, but if you will care to look out THAT window, you will see my yacht The Daydream waiting to carry me and my men safely back to England!" We spent the next half hour quoting the dialog from all the great scenes of this movie back and forth to each other!

Rico is a kindred spirit!