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Imagine a beautiful photo of the St. Louis arch as seen from mid-channel on the Mississippi River. That's what we should have here. Bonnie shot the thing, which looks great postage-stamp size on her cellphone, but we haven't figured out how to tranfer it to my computer, so it isn't here.

It's been a couple of days since I last posted partly because so much has been going on that I haven't had a chance to sit down and post. This is just a short synopsis to catch up.

Let's see. The last time I posted was Thursday, and we'd just settled down in Pekin, Ill. The folks at the Pekin Boat Club were fantastic! They bent over backwards to make sure we got in, and had all the services we needed. They're not set up for boats as large as Damifino!, but managed to make do. DR, in particular, took us under his wing. He chauffeured Bonnie around to the laundry in town, and the grocery store. He found me a couple of mechanics to consult with, and even scouted up a 5/8" deep socket to use instead of my missing spark plug wrench (plugs looked good, by the way).

Once again, the points had closed up just enough to cause trouble on the port engine. On DR's recommendation, we headed to National Marine on Upper Peoria Lake (the wrong direction for the trip, but the right direction to get competent help. The mechanic there, George, looked the situation over and said: "Nobody ever lubricated the distributor cam!"

That was why the points gap kept closing -- the rubbing block (cam follower) was wearing down rapidly, so every time we set the points, the rubbing block wore down and let them close up again. I always lubricate points when replacing them, but I hadn't replaced them, just reset them. George lubricated and set the points on the port engine, and, at my request, the starboard engine. So far (fingers tightly crossed), there's been no further trouble.

Friday we found out about the long stretch of the Illinois River without fuel services. With just an eighth of a tank left, I called a halt, and pulled over to the right descending bank at a ferry crossing.

"You can't tie up here!" one of the attendants shouted, echoing the big sign that said: "Don't tie up here!"

I told him we were running out of fuel and needed to call for help. That changed his tune, and he became very helpful, as just about everyone on the river has been.

Of course, just as we started trying to call for help, the thunderstorms started up, and cellphone coverage became nil. The folks at BoatUS connected us up with Mel of Mel's Riverfront Restaurant, just a few miles downstream. Mel had a floating dock we could tie up to, and offered to give me a ride into town to buy gas. Unfortunately, the causeway from the float to the shore was under three feet of water due to flooding.

Did I mention that the entire river system was 25 ft above normal? I should mention that. It's important.

To make a long story short, by the time I got fuel on board (wading across the flooded causeway with six gallon jerry cans full of gasoline), dusk was falling the rain was picking up, and we should have just stayed there.

But we didn't. I made an executive decision to push on to Alton.

Needless to say, about a half hour later, with the fuel gauge on "E," and darkness well and truly descended, I fired up the VHF radio, and issued my first "Mayday" call. The Coast Guard guy suggested that we anchor out of the channel (Where's the d**n channel? Where's the d**n shore? Those trees look awfully close in the searchlight beam!). Coast Guard suggestions are, like those of cops everywhere, more in the nature of commands -- if you don't follow them, you're asking for trouble. So, we anchored (also for the first time since I was 15) and waited for the Conservation Cops from the Sheriff's Department to tow us into Alton Marina.

At Alton Marina -- 2:00 am -- the starboard engine quit, and wouldn't refire. Not even a click, when I hit the starter! I guess it had gotten jealous of all the attention the port engine had been getting, and wanted its share.

Alton Marina is a beautiful spot, which we stayed at through Saturday just to sort everything out. They loaned us a courtesy car to go on a snipe hunt for a starter solenoid. The service manager at the Bayliner dealership, too far upstream to be of any help other than for information, helped me locate the starter solenoid, and explained that it was a standard automotive part, so I could get a replacement at any autoparts store.

So, Sunday morning, fully refueled, restocked, and revitalized, we pushed off out of the Illinois River and into the Mississippi. We got as far as the first lock, when the lock master mentioned in passing: "By the way, have you gotten permission from the Coast Guard to go downstream?"

"I didn't know we needed permission."

"They've closed the section of river below the next lock because of wreckage in the water."

We don't like the sound of "wreckage in the water."

So, we got a phone number for the Coast Guard from the lock master, and called. Rod Wurgler took down all our particulars, and said to stand by. He'd see if we could get permission.

Some time later, he returned the call and said his supervisor put us off until 10:00 am the next (Monday) morning. We were staring at Alton Marina, just under the bridge upstream of the locks, so we called them and arranged for a slip for the night.

Alton Marina is, perhaps, the best run operation we've seen so far. Beautiful covered slips, showers, clean bathrooms, etc. After lunch at their cafe, we met Grandpa Bob, who took me on a snipe hunt for auxiliary fuel containers and a means of lashing them to the deck. It took a couple of hours, but I came home with means to increase our fuel capacity by 30 gal.

Ten o'clock Monday morning came and went. Not having great confidence in our chances, I'd gotten to work on a couple of projects that needed doing -- expecially bolting down that microwave we'd had to pick up at the last minute when the built-in unit that came with the boat went up in smoke the day before we left.

When the job was finished -- about 10:30 am -- I called Wurgler. He hadn't heard, but promised to check and call back. Sure enough, a few minutes later, he called back with our clearance. It took about an hour to rig for sea, then we were off.

The next stop was Hoppie's Marine, about mile 158 on the Mississippi. It is a de rigeur fuel stop because it's 107 miles to the next possible fuel stop after that. Gotta fill up there, or we'll be calling the Coast Guard again!

At Hoppie's a nice little old lady named Fern sat down with us for about a half hour to disgorge all the information she had available about navigating the Upper Mississippi River. Between her wisdom, a few very thick and very expensive books on the area, as well as all the navigational charts available, we've come up with a plan. I'll explain it next time, and tell you whether it worked.

At least, after a week of trying, we've escaped the clutches of Illinois -- for now.

Port engine out of commission, Damifino sits helplessly in Pekin, Ill., only 100 miles from her departure point in Seneca. Yes, that's my wife making out with the dog, Jack. Jack would like it if I moved out, so he could have her all to himself.

I thought we made mediocre to poor progress Tuesday, but Wednesday was even worse!

Some 25 miles across Lake Peoria, Damifino's port (left for you lubbers) engine started acting up. Thinking that the points had slipped closed, as they had on another occasion, we pulled in at the Pekin Access Point -- a public boat ramp with some easy-to-negotiate floating docks extending into fairly deep water -- to have lunch, let the engines cool down, then assess the situation.

No problem with the points. The rest of the distributor system looked good, too. Carburetor accelerator pump was shooting fuel, so fuel is getting to the carburetor. Those are the easy, obvious things.

Getting a little deeper in, I checked the stutter switch. A stutter switch is a little device that robs the engine of ignition spark, and thus power, to make it easier to shift into neutral while the engine is running. Obviously, if the switch shorts out, or is maladjusted, it can make it stall. Since the problem is stalling at idle, the stutter switch is a prime candidate for blame.

You test the stutter switch via the simple expedient of disconnecting it so the engine thinks its contacts are always open. If it is the problem, disconnecting the stutter switch will make the problem go away. I tried it, and the problem didn't go away, so now what?

We're left with fuel issues. I fueled up Wednesday morning, so I might have gotten a load of bad gasoline. The way to test that is to change the fuel filter. So, I commandeered the dog's aluminum water dish to catch the inevitable spillage, and changed the fuel filter. Still no difference.

They were working on a speedboat engine at the next dock, so I went over to seek help. One fellow was obviously the boat owner -- he confined his mechanical activities to blipping the throttle, and looking both confused and concerned. The other, who turned out to be Larry, watched carefully while listening to what noises the engine made.

Larry was the mechanic.

I asked Larry if, after he'd sorted out the speedboat, he'd stop by and take a look at my port engine. He promised to do so, and I got out of their way.

The speedboat sounded as if it had a modified V-6 with a nearly full-race cam, and no muffler. That made it impossible to idle when cold, and sound really rough when warmed up. Perhaps the owner wasn't familiar with the intricacies of tuning a high-performance engine, and wanted it to idle like a passenger car engine. No F--ing way!

Anyway, a few minutes later Larry wandered over to where the Damifino was docked. I explained the situation, and he suggested that the carburetor float valves might be sticking. That sounded like a possibility, so we discussed it. To solve the problem, I'd have to rebuild the carburetors.

That I can do, providing I can find a carburetor rebuilding kit, but it's a big job and not to be jumped into until all other possibilites are exhausted. Don't want to spend a bunch of dollars and a couple of hours only to find that wasn't the problem!

Larry offered to give me a ride to the local Marine equipment dealer. There, the mechanics were all away, but would be back the next day. No, they didn't stock the correct points and condenser to replace what's in there, so no luck with them. I bought a fender adjuster that had caught my eye on a classic Owens yacht the other day -- thought I'd try one out, myself -- and took the store's card to call again if I couldn't solve the problem otherwise.

By this time, it was 3:00 and the day was pretty much shot. With both the temperature and humidity hovering around 95, I decided to give up on solving the problem for the day, and look for a place to tie up for the night.

Larry suggested hiking along the access road a few hundred yards to the Pekin Boat Club, where we could rent a slip for the night.

I'll try again in the morning.

Changing gambling laws have made riverboat casinos superfluous. We spent the night in riverboat ghost town.

This is the second in the ongoing series following our effort to move the Damifino to Naples, Florida.

We only made 74 miles yesterday, which is actually decent progress on the upper Illinois River, with its locks spaced only a few miles. Considering that we didn't start out until after noontime, and passed three locks before giving up the fight at about 6:00 pm, we did okay. It normally takes 1-2 hours to pass through a lock, so getting three hours travel time out of six hours isn't half bad. That's averaging an hour per lock and 25 mph in between.

Twenty five miles per hour doesn't sound like much to people used to burning up the road at 70-80 mph, but on a boat it's moderately fast for a cruiser. Damifino gets up on plane at 12-18 kt (that's nautical miles per hour -- about 15% faster than the same number in mph). Below that speed, the hull pushes laboriously through the water. Above that speed, it skips over the water like a thrown stone. Planing is much more efficient. In between, the hull is constantly trying to climb the hill of water it pushes up as it tries to plow through.

There are two roughly equivalent ways to think of the process of getting up on plane. Sailors think of it as the hull trying to climb up on its own bow wave. Another way to think of it is the hull trying to climb out of the hole in the water (A boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by fiberglass, into which you throw money.) that Archimedes said it must create to get bouyant force to hold the boat up  against gravity. To a hydrodynamicist, the displacement regime is when bouyant forces support the boat, and planing is when the hydrodynamic lift supports the hull. In between is a transitional regime where the hull rises out of the water, so bouyant force is lower, and hydrodynamic lift does the rest.

The best fuel economy -- miles covered per gallon burned -- comes when the hull moves fast enough to be fully up on plane, but not much faster. It's easy to tell when that happens: when running as a displacement hull, the boat runs flat through the water. As hydrodynamic forces come into play, the nose rises dramatically. When fully on plane, the nose drops back to run nearly horizontally again. At that point, you have to throttle back to avoid running really fast. That's when you get best fuel economy. On Damifino that's between 22 and 25 knots.

In any case, the 74 miles we made yesterday brought us to Hamm's Holiday Harbor Marina in Peoria, Ill. I actually passed the place because all I could see was a bunch of riverboat casinos. Clearly, some were, shall we say, "derelict," being drawn up on dry land. One, however, looked like it could be in operation. I figured that didn't look like the marina we were looking for. I was wrong.

When we sailed in, (boats still "sail," even powerboats without sails) we found a deep pool with floating docks presenting dozens of slips big enough to dock the Damifino. With no better directions, we pulled into the easiest slip to reach, and tied up.

The riverboats are a side business for the marina owner. In the past, shore-based casinos were illegal in Illinois, and a number of midwestern states. There was a loophole, however, that allowed casino gambling on floating platforms -- hence the launching of a slew of riverboat casinos.

That's all changed, now. The states realized how much revenue they were missing, and changed the laws to allow shore-based casino operations. That made the riverboats superfluous. Hamm's marina owner (Mr. Hamm?) has made a tidy business of taking these white elephants off the casino owners' hands, and cutting them up for scrap. Those in and around the marina pool are awaiting the gentle ministrations of low-wage workers bearing cutting torches.

This en

View of the Damifino docked in Seneca, Ill. prior to departure.

This entry breaks, once again, from the stated theme of this blog, which is to look at repurcussions of technological developments for society. We'll get back to that theme when we get back to that theme. In the meantime, take a trip with me down the Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Tombigbee rivers, thence around the Gulf of Mexico to the southern tip of Florida.

Some 40-plus years ago, my then bride-to-be asked: "Hey, could we live on a boat?"

She'd seen my parents spending weeks at a time aboard their 36-foot cabin cruiser during the summer, and it looked like a fun, romantic (and cheap) lifestyle. We were at the time firmly rooted in the Boston, Mass. area, however, so the full-time live-aboard lifestyle was impractical. Yet, the idea persisted, resurfacing from time to time.

Another persistent theme became the "I've never been to Florida. Could we go there?" question. Having visited my grandparents at their winter home near Orlando (long before Disney Corp. turned the place into Mickey's Corporate Office), my impression of Florida was of a gigantic sand spit with bugs, and rain every afternoon. It was never top of my list of places to go, so that idea didn't get very far, either.

More recently, when the school failed to pick up Bonnie's teaching contract for the forthcoming year, we finally decided to chuck it all, and abandon the Chicago-area winters for year-round live-aboard boating at the southern tip of Florida.

In the decades since getting married, we'd developed into gypsies, anyway; we'd picked up our own cabin cruiser; and learned the advantages of avoiding the annual butt-freezing season. It was time to live out Bonnie's particular fantasies.

The first step was, of course, a reconnaissance trip. Borrowing the temporarily empty house of a friend in Marco Island, Florida, we spent a week sampling the fleshpots (which, unlike Las Vegas, means beaches, not night clubs), and scrutinizing marinas.

Destination in hand, we returned to refit the Damifino (pronounced "Damn if I know!" We didn't name her. The previous owner did.) for indefinite occupancy, and move her through the western half of the Great Loop cruise track down through the river system and the Inland Waterway to the Gulf of Mexico, thence around to Florida's southern tip.

Lest this entry be completely without technological interest, let me note that I'm writing this on the upper deck (under that blue awning in the picture) using my laptop computer, which is wirelessly linked to a WiFi router attached to one of the bulkheads below, and running on ship's 12 VDC. Also on the wireless LAN are a printer, and Bonnie's laptop. The router ties into the Internet through a cellphone link.

The text editor I'm using does not run on my laptop. It's an example of thin-client technology in which I type into text boxes in a web page provided by the blogging section of my website, which runs in rented space on my ISP's server. Since the ISP's hardware is a server farm distributed over much of the U.S., it's also an example of cloud computing at its best.

Ain't tecknollogie wunnerfull!

We're now ready -- or as ready as we ever will be. Today, we drop the lines and blow a kiss and a wave to Illinois. In the words of the Paul Simon song: "We're on our way. We don't know where we're goin'!"

We'll know when we get there.

Among those who have gone down to the sea in ships, the thought of being boarded by pirates sends chills down the spine. Unlike Disney's romantic Pirates of the Caribbean, real pirates are simply armed criminals looking for helpless prey caught far from aid. Throughout most of history, they have been small, isolated gangs hoping to strike and escape before detection is possible. Sailors' greatest fear is that they might slaughter witnesses to avoid identification.

Occasionally, however, geopolitical forces provide an opportunity for organized maritime criminals to create a safe haven for themselves. When that happens, pirate crews become emboldened, thinking they are safe from reprisals. Such is currently the case in Somalia, where political collapse provided an opening for just such a pirate haven.

Figure 1: LRAD directed-sound system acts as a loudspeaker with an effective range of 300 to 3,000 m.

Technology is helping an ad hoc alliance of major maritime nations mount a measured response to this threat. For example, in early April, while western media focused on an incident where a pirate attack on a U.S. flag freighter escalated into a hostage situation, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force used an LRAD 1000X directed sound system manufactured by American Technology Corporation (ATC) to help prevent another pirate attack off the coast of Somalia, this time on a Singaporean tanker. Responding to the tanker's distress call, the Japanese destroyer, Suzunami, used powerful voice commands to identify itself and warn the pirates away.

The directed-sound system, which can be seen in an Asian News Network (ANN) report available on YouTube, acts as a powerful loudspeaker capable of communicating from 300 meters to over 3,000 meters with authority and high intelligibility. The Japanese vessel used vocal commands and powerful warning tones to warn the pirates away from their intended victim. The ANN report, unfortunately, is entirely in Japanese. A related report includes comments in English by a French Naval officer describing the international anti-piracy effort.

According to ATC, the company's proprietary Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) are currently used in a variety of government, military and commercial applications around the world, including deployments with the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy. "LRAD has been successfully deployed to help stop several pirate incidents off the Horn of Africa over the last four years," said Tom Brown, president and CEO of American Technology. "Beginning with the attack on the Seabourn Spirit in November 2005, Somali pirates have become increasingly brazen in their attempts to seize ships, crew and cargo for ransom. We are increasing our efforts to support domestic and international military and commercial security forces in the fight to take back the seas from 21st century pirates."