Hello everyone, meet Lorelei IV, a 50 ft Hatteras built in 1965, hull #9.
We are Rob and Naomi, her current proud owners. This is our first blog post. We purchased Lorelei IV two years ago and have been getting acquainted since then. We would eventually like to move aboard and cruise in warmer climates, but at this point, we still need to work, save, and plan. She was on Lake Barkley when we bought her, which is a very beautiful area with lots of easy places to cruise and anchor, so we stayed there in Green Turtle Bay Marina for our first 2 boating seasons. This spring we decided to move her to the St. Louis area, which is only 2 hours away instead of 6. This is exactly what we did this past week.
The stats- 4days, 46 hours underway, 300 miles, 5 locks, 4 rivers.
The first lock was the Kentucky Dam lock on the Tennessee River. We actually had an Asian Carp jump into our dingy! They put on quite a show while the water dropped.
Sasha is our on board trainer - she continually wants to play catch or tug-a-war. Due to the 4-6 knot current going up the Mississippi, which made deploying our dingy quite challenging, we went for a stretch of 49 hours without going to shore for nature calls! But she did great and didn't complain about using a door mat for her potty needs.
We made it to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial ( Gateway Arch), but still had 2 locks to go. We still needed to make our way up the Chain of Rocks canal (Lock #27) and then finally through the Mel Price lock( Lock #26) at Alton, IL. Well, this last lock was the trouble maker due to the main lock being shutdown for repairs, so we spent 3-4 hours waiting to lock through since the auxiliary lock was smaller.
Due to this delay, we had a few miles to go after nightfall. This was a very scary since there was a large amount of debris in the water.
Finally our new view from our new slip! Sasha is excited about future trips to the sand beach for long walks and Frisbee sessions!
Coming up in our next post will be our want/need to do list.
