After Ben got up and started the engines, he walked around and checked out the boat, like he normally does before starting the day, and noticed a channel marker was stuck under our tunnel, between the pontoons, at the stern of the boat. For a moment I wondered if this was there and I didn't notice that we ran over it while I was doing an amazing job anchoring last night. Ben wondered the same- maybe we anchored near it and swung onto it overnight. We both remembered hearing a loud noise in the middle of the night and chalked it up to the kids not putting their stuff away.
Initially, Ben thought he'd just let it loose, but worried about liability if it hit someone else's boat. So, he called the coast guard. A couple phone calls later, he got to speak to someone and gave them our coordinates. They didn't have a timeline for when they'd be able to send someone. A few minutes after that, he received a message saying to let it loose, so he did. I videoed the event and it was pretty uneventful- with the exception of Ben estimating it being 8 feet tall. He did say the top of it had a lot of fiberglass on it from when it slid under the tunnel of our boat. It somehow floated down the river, perfectly aligned with our anchor, slid between the bridle lines, under the tunnel, and only stopped because the height of our tunnel decreased. Would it have otherwise gone right through, unnoticed?! Crazy to think that might be true and we would have never known. (How do these seemingly very random and nearly impossible things happen to us?! Is it Mike's Boating Curse?) We watched it as it cruised down the Mississippi River from us, to the banks on the Illinois side.
