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.
   

    4/1/14 - 4/14/14    We planned on taking the Confetti up to Lake Michigan and to leave it there as our summer escape from Texas summers.  Our projected departure date was April 1st but a couple of bad weather days and a string of mechanical difficulties (aft head pump froze up, fresh water pump quit, galley lights stopped lighting) all seemed to be conspiring to prevent our leaving.  Thank you Mike and Linda for the taxi service through the false starts.   As it turned out, all those events were fortunate because they were fairly easily overcome at the home dock but would have been practically impossible to remedy after we were already underway.   We stopped in Seabrook Shipyard to get the Confetti's bottom pressure washed and scrapped then waited a day at the dock for an extremely windy day to pass.   On April 9th we finally set out on a perfect travel day and ran the length of Galveston Bay to enter the Intercoastal Canal.   We docked at Stingaree Marina on the Bolivar Peninsula.   We walked 1/2 mile to a Valero for a $4.00 half gallon of milk and then half way back when we felt our steam running low.   I thumbed down a local in a pickup who trucked us the last 1/4 mile.   Funny how you forget how far a mile is when you're on shoe leather.
    The 50 miles between Bolivar and Port Arthur is almost totally undeveloped because it is so low and flat that it is an unsuitable dwelling for anything except many varieties of birds and the occasional cow.    We enjoy the birds (and the cows).
    The boat was performing well.   The new navigation software on the laptop with it's Bluetooth GPS was working great (Thanks Johnny!).   We anchored at Shell Island just shy of the Louisiana state line and the newly rebuilt windlass pulled up the anchor the next morning without a problem.
    Bow Tie Marina near Lake Charles is a nice place to stop.   It has reasonably priced fuel and is walking distance to a Dollar store.  It's in the shadow of the L'Auberge Casino but we didn't donate.   We wanted to leave early because the first obstacle of the day was a lock that reportedly was closed for maintenance.   It turned out the lock master was cordial to pleasure boats and he passed us through with very little delay.   Later an alligator was sighted entering the water from the bank.   It reminded me of the Tarzan movies.    We were now 160 miles from the Mississippi and we stopped a day in Intracoastal City, to wait out a line of thunderstorms.   It's a nice commercial dock with WiFi but the work boat traffic goes by 24/7 so we were waked and rumbled occasionally in the night.   Next stop Houma, LA.