Ron Reimann loved the setup he had in New Buffalo, Michigan, where he kept his Silverton 372 aft-cabin motoryacht, Flying Colors. He and his wife Nancy and their two kids, Lisa and Brad, didn't mind the hour or so drive they had from their Chicago home to get to the boat. Western Lake Michigan had lots of interesting places to visit, the shoreline looked as rugged as the coast of California, and they had long-time friends at the dock. But he knew that when the family moved to Minnesota a few years ago, the boat would eventually have to come, too.
RON REIMANNFlying Colors docked in Chicago. The summer of 2008 turned out to be the right time to take Flying Colors home, so the family prepared for the voyage. Reimann time getting the right charts for his Garmin chartplotter and more time investigating marinas and fuel stops along the way.
It wouldn't be his first trip. When Reimann was 14, his father bought a boat in Michigan, and together they made almost the same journey. The journal young Reimann recorded of that trip, thought to be lost for many years, recently turned up and Reimann smiled at the entries he made as an enthusiastic teenager who didn't want the trip to end.
This summer's plan was to take the boat more than 1,000 miles west to Afton, Minnesota, on the St. Croix River. They left Aug. 1 for a planned 16-day run. Thirty-one locks, 23 days and a case of fuel filters later, the Reimanns finally tied up in Afton, no worse for the wear but much wiser and more experienced.
The family kept an online journal of their trip, and the daily entries make for good reading – and some great lessons for anybody planning a family cruise.
RON REIMANNFlying Colors pauses for the night under a bridge.THE LONG WAY
It takes about seven and a half hours to drive a car 455 miles from New Buffalo to Afton. Yet the same trip by boat requires traveling more than twice that distance – 1,016 nautical miles, to be exact.
The route sounds straightforward enough: cross Lake Michigan to Chicago, head down the canals to the Illinois River and run down until it meets up with the mighty Mississippi just north of St. Louis. Then, run 600 miles back up the Mississippi, turn right into the St. Croix River and cruise 20 miles to Afton.
But in reality, the passage is complicated by nearly three dozen locks and dams, long stretches of un-navigable water on rivers and canals and more than a few bridges with paper-thin clearance. Flying Colors bent an anchor light passing below one.
In addition, the price of fuel mandated a slow trip. Watching prices rise throughout the spring, the family planned on an average cost of $5 per gallon – and that was only slightly pessimistic. The Reimanns planned to make the trip at hull speed, the speed at which the hull is most efficient while traveling in full-displacement rather than planning mode. The rule of thumb for determining hull speed is to multiply the square root of the length of the hull at the waterline by 1.34, which acknowledges the direct relationship between hull length and the speed capabilities. For Flying Colors, the calculation results in a speed of 8 knots.
RON REIMANNThe Reimann boat underway to Minnesota.LOCKED UP
Few things were more stressful, however, than the locks, each a delicate exercise in timing and boat handling (to say nothing of the vagaries of sometimes-moody lock operators). In all, Flying Colors passed through 31 locks, most of which took the boat safely around dams in the rivers. The Reimanns became a practiced crew, with Ron at the helm and Nancy, Lisa and Brad handling the lines inside the locks.
"Lisa and I hold the ropes in the locks, she takes the bow and I take the stern and it all goes pretty well," Nancy noted in a log entry. "And just when we thought we got it down, we had a floating bollard on Lock #19 in Keokuk, which means we had only one rope wrapped around a [cleat] in the middle of the boat. This was a 28-foot rise, the biggest we have had on the Mississippi so far. The wind and current were strong and our boat was hitting the wall pretty hard. I thought our bumpers were going to burst. Ron and I were pushing against the wall as hard as we could…I am surprised nothing got damaged."
Commercial traffic always has priority on the big rivers, so recreational boaters can find themselves waiting quite a while for their turn to transit a lock. But by coincidence, a barge had grounded north of St. Louis on the Mississippi and blocked most southbound commercial traffic, which meant that Flying Colors rarely had to wait for a lock to empty.
FUEL FOLLIES
The voyage was a new experience not only for the Reimanns, but also for Flying Colors, which found itself in warm river waters, often populated with large collections of trees, limbs and other debris. The family adapted to the changing conditions, but Flying Colors, like all things mechanical, resisted change.
The situation presented itself almost immediately – at the end of the first long day of travel. Brad noted the development in the log: "Approximately 3:15 we began our wait to enter Lock #2 on our trip. As the moment came to enter the lock with a 40-foot water drop, we started having engine problems. The starboard engine committed suicide and was acting all screwy. So somehow we made it to lock #3 when both our engines were so messed up that we couldn't proceed. So we decided to anchor out and after a while decided to dock up at some restaurant which happens to be closed Sundays."
RON REIMANNLong, sunny days on the river were common.Reimann was on the phone and the Web right away, trying to diagnose the problem. "Everybody said, 'go with what's common (to both engines) – the fuel,'" he explained in an interview. "We had also gotten ethanol fuel for the first time right before the trip, so the theory was that the first alcohol in the system was doing a clean-up job." A mechanic arrived at the boat the next afternoon, decided the fuel filters were clogged and replaced them. Ron didn't think they looked clogged, but since the engines started right up after the filter change, he had to agree with the diagnosis.
The trouble reoccurred the next long travel day. "When we changed the filters the first time, we used my spares – so I'm thinking I've got to have more spares for these Racors," he said. "I thought now that I have the magic bullet, I'll just have to change them a few more times."
He ordered a whole case of filters and had them sent to a marina a few days ahead. "When I had the problem again, transiting from the Illinois to the Mississippi River, I had filters all ready and primed to change underway," he said. "I thought maybe I installed them wrong when it happened again right away – the filters didn't seem to solve the problem."
Flying Colors limped downriver to St. Louis to pick up a relative for the next segment of the trip. Headed back upriver on the Mississippi, both engines died just 10 miles short of the day's destination. Fuel-filter changes didn't help. The Reimanns found themselves anchored just downriver from a barge that wanted to swing right through where Flying Colors was positioned. A call to BoatU.S. eventually got a speedboat to them, and after a chaotic experience – including more time in the dark on a big river than they wanted – the Reimanns docked at a tiny remnant of a marina, where a family celebration wandered down to the single dock to help "bring the big boat in."
COOLING OFF
Troubleshooting in earnest began as soon as Nancy and Lisa were picked up by some St. Louis relatives and Ron could find a phone that worked. He got two mechanics headed his way – one to polish the fuel and the other, sent by the nearest Crusader dealer, to replace the fuel pumps.
The first mechanic never made it; his truck broke down, and he had to be towed 70 miles back home. The second mechanic arrived and began an end-to-end inspection of the fuel system on one engine. From the fuel tanks to the fuel pickups to the pumps and filters, everything appeared to be fine. Even the engine diagnostic codes revealed nothing. The mechanic decided it wasn't worth examining the other engine and consulted with his boss back at the shop. Crusader was suggesting that perhaps cooling was the issue.
Reimann pondered it. "It made sense as I thought about it," he said. "The engine that would die first was the engine that had the least amount of fuel in the tank. We recirculate the fuel to the tank and it goes to that least-full tank. So if you're having a temperature-related problem with the fuel, it will become apparent first on the engine drawing fuel from that tank.
"The fuel filters never 'clogged' in the morning, but they did in the afternoon when I shut down in the locks and sat, with no blowers running. So the question was how to keep everything cool.
Reimann called his wife and asked her to stop at the nearest department store and buy a 20-inch box fan. "It fit perfectly in one of the hatches, blowing into the engine room right between the engines, with the salon windows open," Reimann said.
The long detective process finally paid off. Reimann did have to replace the fuel pump on his generator, but by that time he was feeling like an old hand in the engine room and got the job done without much trouble.
RON REIMANNThe Reimann family celebrates on the dock at home.
HOW LOW TO GO?
Still, there were other challenges. Even though Flying Colors draws only 39 inches or so, inland river travel made the Reimanns perpetually concerned about depth. Rivers move so much silt and debris that conditions can change even from day to day. Ron says many harbormasters and dockmasters were sometimes cavalier when assessing the water depths at their docks or on the approaches. The common refrain: "Oh, you 'should' be fine."
One marina even told him to "pick any slip on the A-pier," Reimann said. "So I picked one that looked good and started to back in, when my crew warned me it didn't look good. So I pulled out and just moved to another one farther out." Roughly 20 minutes later, a ski boat pulled into the slip he first targeted, the owner pushed a button on the piling, and a lift popped out of the water.
Twenty-three days into their 16-day trip, the Reimann family cleared lock #31 and pulled into slip D-2 at the Afton Marina, at about 2:30 in the afternoon. They were met by flying pennants, balloons, a banner and champagne, thanks to friends and relatives. The celebration continued at a local restaurant and concluded – by unanimous family decision – with all crewmembers dropping heavily into their own beds at home.
The only real work to be done on the boat to bring her back to Bristol shape was clean a dozen fenders, fouled by the locks.
"I do believe somebody up above was looking out for us," Reimann said.
Tom Tripp is a freelance writer specializing in technology and marine science, whose work has appeared in publications such as Northeast Boating and Chesapeake Bay Magazine. In addition to contributing features on new boats and technology, Tom writes a blog here on Mad Mariner.