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Teresa Scott takes in the river view aboard Traveller.
David and Anne Scott make their way through the locks in Ottawa.
Scott's journey took him past Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
Dr. David Scott sits on Traveller, his 40-foot boat, on the Champlain Canal in New York earlier on his voyage. |
BY JIM HALL
Dr. David Scott will dock at a marina in Alabama next week, lock up Traveller, his boat, and head for home in Fredericksburg.
Scott is more than halfway through America's Great Loop, the 6,000-mile circuit of the waterways of eastern North America.
Behind him are the Hudson, the St. Lawrence, the Straits of Mackinac, the Mississippi and the Tennessee.
Still to come are the Tombigbee, the Black Warrior, Lake Okeechobee and the Intracoastal Waterway.
Life as a "looper" suits him, Scott said, but for now it's time to go back to work. He's due back in September at Radiologic Associates of Fredericksburg, where he's worked as a radiologist for 36 years.
But he's "partly retired" from the medical practice, so come October, he'll return to Joe Wheeler State Park, where's he has tied up Traveller, and resume the adventure that began last year.
Scott departed Port Kinsale in Westmoreland County in May 2009 and headed north to Canada. His boat, named for Robert E. Lee's horse, is a 40-footer Express by Cruisers Yachts, with dual 370-horsepower Volvo Penta engines.
With a little luck and only a few mechanical problems, he completed the first leg of the journey in four months, stopping at North Shore Marina in Spring Lake Michigan. There he stored Traveller for the winter at a heated indoor facility.
He returned to the boat this summer for the second leg of his trip. Since July, he has explored the waters of Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama.
He's learned what countless "loopers" before him have learned, that if you have the time and money, you can travel this country through an interconnected network of rivers and lakes and return home months later without ever having taken your boat out of the water.
RAISED ON THE RIVER
In a sense, Scott, 68, was born to travel the blue highways. When he was growing up, his family had a cottage on Aquia Creek in Stafford County. His father, Dr. David Scott Jr., a Fredericksburg internist, built a rowboat, with a 3.2-horsepower engine, and let David and his younger brother, Paul Scott, explore the nearby waters.
"Paul and I could go pretty much anywhere we wanted as long as we had our life jackets on," Scott said.
Since then, he's owned a succession of boats, some new and some used. And he's traveled farther from home--to South Carolina, Florida, New York City, Rhode Island and the Bahamas.
Ten years ago, he learned about the Great Loop, which boating enthusiasts describe as "one of the safest long-distance cruising routes in the world."
"As soon as he heard about it, he thought it was really, really interesting," said Anne Scott, his wife.
Anne Scott joined her husband for a portion of the trip last year and again for three weeks this summer. Family, friends and a pair of colleagues from work also have taken vacations to be guest crews.
Along the way, Scott has shown them parts of the country seen only by boaters. He's gone by small cities and big ones, through downtown Ottawa and Chicago. He's navigated more than 100 locks, each with its own ritual of passage.
In the Champlain Canal System in upstate New York, "One person on the bow holds a vertical cable or sometimes a soggy, dirty line, and another at the stern does the same," Scott wrote in an e-mail to friends.
Going up in a lock is a little harder than going down, he said, since water boils in from below and tries to push the boat away from the sidewalls.
A SUBMERGED ROCK
While hot at times, the weather so far has been good, and the boat has held up well.
Scott did hit a submerged rock in Frying Pan Bay in Canada. The boat lifted out of the water as it rode over the rock. The collision bent the drive shaft and pushed the propellers on the port side into one another.
He had to lay up for repairs at a marina in Parry Sound.
Scott has also had to replace the impeller in the water pump and pull apart the dash to figure out why the radio and GPS weren't working.
But he has a tool box and spare parts and the knowledge and experience to do small jobs. To him, these kinds of problems are "just boating."
On Lake Michigan, he and Paul Scott had planned to stop at several places on the eastern shore of the lake. Instead, they woke to clear skies and calm waters and decided to take advantage of it. They made a run for Chicago, 110 miles away, flat out at 30 mph, until the city's skyline appeared in the distant mist.
"It reminded me of Brigadoon, a mystical place," he said.
He dodged the jumping Asian carp of the Illinois River and the giant barge trains of coal and grain on the Mississippi.
He also discovered that the only place to buy diesel fuel on a 150-mile stretch of the Mississippi, from just above St. Louis to Lake Barkley, Ky., was at Charley Brown's place at Cape Girardeau. Be sure to call ahead to make sure Charley is there to meet you.
And that inviting smell at Charley's comes from a high-ceilinged old warehouse onshore. It's now a barbecue restaurant.
"We walked into town and partook," Scott said.
Will and Teresa Scott, his son and daughter-in-law, were with him then, and at one point Teresa went for a swim.
"The current was so strong I would swim as hard as I could and not go anywhere," she wrote afterward.
And at every stop, he's met interesting people, such as Fern Hoppie, the marina operator near Kimmswick, Mo., who insisted that her visitors listen to her lecture on the dangers of the river.
In Whitehall, N.Y., the curator at a museum that was closed for the season opened it for Scott, because he had been treated so well when he visited Fredericksburg several years ago.
Three Canadian boaters knocked on his boat in Port of Orillia and presented him with cheesecake for Canada Day.
And a Canadian family, three generations of them, took him to their cottage for dinner and onto Port Severn for a fireworks show.
At a marina in Clifton, Tenn., he and Anne were talking with other boaters when Scott mentioned that he had never eaten yellow catfish. One of the men picked up his phone and called a friend who at that moment was tending a trotline on the Tennessee. About 45 minutes later, the man showed up with a plastic bag filled with ice and four pounds of catfish fillets.
That made for a couple of nice dinners and lunches, Anne Scott said.
Anne Scott flew back from Nashville last week, and her husband is scheduled to arrive next week. He'll stay here for about two months then return to Traveller for the third leg of his trip.
He'll go south to Mobile, cross the Gulf of Mexico and skirt the west coast of Florida to Fort Myers. There he'll store the boat for a second winter.
Finally, in March he'll return to Florida to bring Traveller home. If the wind is at his back and the tide is in his favor, he'll pull into Kinsale next May, two years after he left.
Jim Hall: 540/374-5433
Email: jhall@freelancestar.com
