Wow, what a change we had on our planned river cruise. After we boarded our boat from spending a day in St Francisville LA we were advised that the boat was having one of its two generators repaired and our departure would be delayed several hours. Later in the day the captain came on the public address system and advised the passengers of a 5PM meeting and one person from each stateroom should attend to hear some important information. Uh oh -- that doesn’t sound good. We went to the meeting and the captain advised us that there was a crack in the main shaft of the paddle wheel and they could no longer use the wheel to propel us up river. He said we have a small secondary engine that could move us up river but not at a fast speed. He also said for safety’s sake the Cost Guard is requiring a tow boat to assist us up river. He then advised us that our next stop, Nachez MS, would not be reached until late Monday afternoon, not Monday morning as originally scheduled. This delay would cause us to miss the port of Vicksburg MS. So we chalked it up to just another missed port on a cruise.
Tow boat pushing our Steamboat Broken paddle wheel with tow boat in background
We did have a nice relaxing day cruising the river. We got to see many things that we would have missed while touring in Nachez . Such as:
a Coast Guard river patrol boat and a tow boat pushing 35 full barges at once.
We also had a great talk in the river boat saloon about navigating the river by one of our river pilots.
and we had time to catch up on our reading and take a long stroll on the boat.
We are sorry that we are going to miss Vicksburg but are excited about spending a full day in Nachez.
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