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.
