Still Iced In

Sunset tonight.

                                                        The really big barge clearing the ice.

 The ice still has us pinned in here at the boatyard.  There are now 5 boats being held hostage from the Nor'Easter  and we're all waiting for the stars to line up so we can move on downstream.  We had a really big tugboat pushing a really big barge, maybe 30' wide by 150' long.  It was large enough to break up virtually all the sheets of ice on the river.  Unfortunately, the tugboat came by us at 2pm, too late for us to follow his ice free path.  There are no places to anchor out or docks to tie up to between here and our next stop, 4 hours down the way.  The latest we could safely leave and still arrive in the daylight is no later than 1pm.  So, we are enjoying our reasonably priced dock tie that includes electricity and water if we wanted to drag enough water hoses to fill the tank, but we have plenty of that too.  We decided to go to the Piggly Wiggly store for milk and a few other things.  It was a 13 minute walk and we took Ellie so she could do some sniffing along the way.  There was a Chinese food restaurant at the little shopping center, we decided to forgo Cheesy Broccoli soup for Beef and Broccoli and Fried Rice.  The soup will hold until tomorrow, ha.  The nightly low temps have been warming up, from 16 degrees, to 24 degrees, to 34 degrees tonight.  With the water being 40.4 degrees, we are hoping the water won't refreeze and all 5 of us can't leave.  But the big decision....who's leaving first and taking point, hmmm.