Travels of the Confetti

4/15/14 - 4/25/14   Houma LA is a great place to stop.   We know the dockmaster from previous stays.   He rides from home on his bike to collect $25 per night including electricity and pump-out.    We shook hands like old pals.    We met a couple on a fairly large sailboat that was registered in Deer Lodge, Montana.   You can apparently register a boat wherever you want, regardless of whether there's enough water there to float it.    Anchored out the next night on Lake Salvadore.    Lots of noise from airboats, presumably on tourist swamp tours, but that quieted with evening.  

   We planned to stop for a couple of days to visit friends that we hadn't seen since the loop in 2011.   They live in a swamp on the Tickfaw river which is northwest of Lake Pontchartrain.    If you look in the encyclopedia under "Cajun Hospitality" their picture is in there.    We stayed three days and they fed us three squares a day, took us to West Marine (twice), Walmart and the grocery store.   The highlights were "Shrimp and Grits" and Chicago style deep dish pizza with homemade crust.   Nice folks.   We said goodbye and two days later we were across Lake Pontchartrain.and back on the Intracoastal Canal headed east.
    Mississippi Sound is basically 90 miles of open water punctuated with a few barrier islands.   It can really be uncomfortable if the weather turns bad on you but we had a great crossing including a night at anchor off of Horn Island, a National Seashore.   At the eastern end is Dauphine Island, Alabama where we stopped at the marina for the evening.    Dauphine Island has some nice attractions including two Civil War forts and an aquarium but we wanted to take a pause.    Tomorrow we start north into Mobile Bay.