Days - 9 & 10

GOOD NEWS - GOOD NEWS - GOOD NEWS...and a little bit of bad.

Lets go ahead and get the bad out of the way right now so we can get on with the good. Day 9 didn't get Capt. Ned as far as he had hoped. I talked to him at 8:30 pm and he said he was unable to use Wilson all day. It was completely manual. He paddled 20 miles and ended up 4 miles from Darwin, Illinois, where he set up camp on the Illinois bank of the Wabash and had oooodles of noodles for dinner.

He said that in the morning he planning to stop in Darwin to do a little trading with the natives. Darwin, by the way is one of Clark County's first settlements. It still maintains a ferry for crossing the Wabash. The ferry is mostly used by the local farmers to access property across the river. Sounds like an award winning little town.

You're probably thinking that's not so bad, so he had to do a little paddling, he knew what he was in for. Well...it now gets worse. Day 10 lasted only 4 hours. He stopped around 1:00 pm this afternoon. Captain Ned currently resides in Darwin. Yep...4 hours to go 4 miles. Can you say...major head wind. He earned those 4 miles. I myself haven't talked to him yet today, but I know the call will be coming later and I can pretty much bet he'll say it was worth it. Oh he'll also say that he damn sure would have rather been hanging out with Wilson, but it's still all good.

Okay enough about that, lets get on with the good...I just save a bunch of money on my car insurance. I'm sorry I could resist. Day 9 wasn't all bad, yes he had to paddle all day, but he didn't have the head wind. He also informed Keith that he had his first fish bath. He said there were gazillions of carp jumping all along side of the kayak and soaked him. Pretty cool. He's now had breakfast with deer, he watched an eagle swoop down 30 yards off of the bow and snag a fish and now he finally had a bath.

Speaking of bath, I know he's had a couple along the way, but he will no longer have wait, wish or wonder when the next one is coming. My cousins Kevin and Larry hit the road around noonish today, day 10, and was heading south to meet up with their good 'Ol Uncle Ned. They're taking him supplies. One of the items being a very compact portable shower unit that will heat the water. Other items are a solar powered cell phone charger, which Larry said he tested the day before and it worked great. A small crank radio, that runs either on AA batteries, or you can just crank that sun-of-a...gun right up.

But wait...there's more...

Some of the best news for Capt. Ned is they have a cooler full of icy cold "Gold Tops". Well let's see here, it's now 6:20 pm 5/30/08 I'll bet their having a few of them bad boys right now. Okay, I'm jealous I wish I was there. So lets not talk about them. What they have or what they're doing, lets talk about us and what we, the readers, get. Not only will Larry and Kevin be taking some pictures of the captain, and his Darwin camp site, which I will get posted ASAP, but they also picked us up a couple disposable digital cameras. Our cameras include stamp addressed envelopes, so we will now be able get some action shots from Captain Ned Mott himself. I hope for our sake, because it's all about us, that he takes pictures better then he used to.