Since the GIWW is heavily traveled by barges, we hear them talking back and forth all day long.  It’s almost like the CB radios truckers used, or maybe still do.  The let each other know where they are because they are huge.  The photo above really doesn’t do the length justice.  When they round a turn, they always let other traffic in the area know, because the have to go sideways.  Everyone is very polite, and we hear a lot of, “Merry Christmas to you and yours” in their southern accents.  We also hear a lot of, “See you on the 1,” which means they are passing each other  on their port side.  If they pass on the “2” it’s the starboard side.  This originated with whistle signals between boats.

We passed two sailboats traveling east together this morning. They were coming from Corpus Christi and had stopped at Morgan City last night.   They were headed for Florida and the Caribbean, so they are taking the exact opposite route we are traveling.

Much of our sail today was through Cypress Swamps.  To see photos, click here.

We got to the Morgan City Marina at 2:45 so we stopped.  The next good place to stop was another 20 miles for an anchorage off the GIWW.

There isn’t much here, but we walked a mile to a Chinese Buffet.  That was our Christmas Eve dinner. I checked for restaurants on our GPS and then decided to look for a Starbucks.  There weren’t any here, but I was quite disappointed to see that there had been one in Houma where we stayed last night!

We have 443 miles to go to reach Corpus Christi. That’s probably about 10 days.