…where we meandered through the haunting bayous, past the land of blue-roofed houses, through Cajun parishes with names like Terrebonne and Cane to the culinary capital New Orleans. Nature’s raw beauty and savagery on full display…
The grassy banks of the inland bayous give way to cypress forests and shallow lakes as you get closer to the Gulf.
Scars from storms, recent and past, are everywhere in the bayous.
In each of the places we have visited this year, we have met friendly, engaging people. Some have been boaters – in Greenville, Hal, who was kind enough to educate us on the area and its history AND offered to take us anywhere we needed to go – and some have had nothing to do with boating – in Presque Isle, the fellow ice cream customer who rides his Harley across the US once a year and took the time to tell us his story. We did not ever imagine that we would be more surprised, and pleased, at the generosity and kindness of strangers after our previous experiences… until Morgan City. There, we met Pete the town dock master (and local building inspector and cemetery manager) who checked in with us several times just to make sure we were okay. There, we met the kind clerk in the gift store who offered to drive me to another store to buy a postcard because she did not have any. There, a tow captain alerted us that our next lock lock was closed and told us to contact Berwick Traffic Control. There, the owner of Shannon Hardware had one of his employees drive us (in HIS car) to a competitor because he only sold 7/8″ anchor line in 300ft rolls but his competitor would cut us the 100ft we needed. There, the supervisor at EJ Fields Machine Works let us use their degreasing bath and cleaned off a work bench for us to re-assemble our sail-drive clutch assembly. And Virgil, who not only does the most thorough, fascinating tour of Mr Charlie, but also gave us to the tip to ask EJ Fields AND helped us to properly dispose of two cans of questionable diesel fuel. I think there must be something in the water there that makes everyone soooo gracious!
But on to Mr Charlie, the subject of this post… Mr Charlie is the first, and only remaining of its vintage, “re-useable oil rig”. Re-usable in the sense that it was mobile because it was built on a barge. It could drill a well and then be moved to drill another, elsewhere (up to that point in time, deep water rigs were permanent structures). Laborde, the naval engineer who championed the design, struggled to convince his company, or other major players, of the viability of the idea. He did though, finally, manage to get backing and Mr Charlie was built, deployed and proved that the barge concept was productive and safe
Virgil’s tour took us up and down the rig: into the crew quarters, onto the drilling platform, down in the mudroom. Along the way, he provided the color for each of these areas, explained how an oil well was drilled, spoke to us about the Deepwater Horizon tragedy and explained the effort he was engaged in trying to obtain a National Historic site designation. The rig is an engineering marvel and deserves the designation; it has already earned awards from the ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and the AWS (American Welding Society). If you are interested in supporting the effort to earn National Historic site designation, look for the app ‘Shadow – Puzzle Game’ which the museum developed and is using as a fund raiser. And do not miss this tour if your travels bring you this way; it was right up there with the factory tour at BMW!
The pipe handling robot.
The Atchafalaya River meets the Gulf Intracoastal Way (GICW) in Louisiana’s twin cities of Berwick and Morgan City. The cities sit opposite one another with railway and highway bridges connecting the two. Our destination was Morgan City but there was a large dredging machine on the city dock when we arrived so we were lucky enough to get a glimpse of Berwick, as well.
Berwick was the fishing side of the river. We docked in front of a seafood processing plant between these guys…
There was some sort of art installation along the waterfront park. These were 5′ x 8′ panels scattered along the dock and the lawn. There was nothing to explain who the artists were or what the theme of the display was; they were nice nonetheless.
Both Berwick and Morgan City were all dressed up for Christmas. The tree in the foreground is in Morgan City and across the river you can see the Berwick Christmas display!