5/13/14 - 5/25/14    The Tennessee River is beautiful.   Rocky hills make sedimentary rock cliffs at the river's edge.   It ends at the high point of the Tennessee in Kentucky Lake.  To avoid heavy barge traffic we did a quick shuffle from Kentucky Lake, through the Barkley Canal (1.5 miles)  into Barkley Lake (large and serene), then down into the Cumberland River (totally unremarkable), then into the Ohio River (fast flowing and commercial) and finally, we turned into the dreaded Mississippi all within 4 days.   As expected, the Mississippi was the most formidable challenge that we had encountered.   Recent rains made the current run between 4 and 5 miles per hour.   That made our speed over ground around 4 mph.   There are very few marinas and almost no good off-the-river anchor sights.    Even St. Louis has no marina for transient boats.   There are concrete wing dams almost continuously along the banks which are to control bank erosion and keep the center of the river deep and navigable.   They do that nicely but make the shore unapproachable for boats our size because of the danger of impact.  It was necessary to get up at around 5AM to be underway by at least 6:30 and run up to 10 hours to reach an acceptable anchorage.    If, for some reason the anchorage was too shallow or not available for some other reason, we needed a few more hours of daylight to find a secondary target.   Running at night is too dangerous.   Even the best anchorages were just off the navigation channel and at night we could hear the river gurgle past with the occasional bump of a branch or log as it hit the hull.   The wake and noise from passing tows (and the occasional train) made sleep intermittant.  If  it weren't for the anchor-drag alarm on the GPS, we would have had to stand watch all night.    After 200 miles of the Mississippi we reached a great marina at Alton Illinois.   It is just above two lock/dams so the current was greatly diminished from here on and it was only 20 more miles until we were to turn onto the Illinois River.

 

5/7/14 - 5/12/14   As we moved into Mississippi the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway was becoming much easier to deal with.   There had been no recent rains so the waterway flowed much slower allowing us to greatly increase our progress north.   This is a canal that the U.S. Congress created in the 80's to connect the Tennessee River to the Mobil River for commercial traffic.   This project was based on an Army Corp of Engineers estimate of the barge traffic that would be using it which turned out to be wildly optimistic.   It is much straighter than the lower rivers so it was much easier to pilot.   The highlight of this stretch happened when we approached the last lock before the Tennessee River.    The Jamie Whitten Lock has the largest lift on the river at 84 feet.   There was already a very large tow (a tugboat pushing barges is refered to as a "tow") already in the lock when we were approaching.   The Black Belt was a 3500 horse power behemoth pushing 5 barges filled with coal and coke and 2 empties.   Some tugboat captains would not want to fool with pleasure boats but this one allowed us to tie up to him and take the ride up.   That saved us more than an hour of wait time while he rode up alone.   The next day we reached the Tennessee River.

4/26/14 - 5/6/14    We had a few minor mechanical issues (as always) so we planned on stopping in Mobile Bay at Dog River Marina which is a full service marina with it's own West Marine.    Unfortunately our weather window was about to close and once closed it would have been days before Mobile Bay was fit to travel on again.   We skipped Dog River and ran the length of the bay in one day to the relative safety of the Mobile River.   We knew when we started this trek that going up the rivers against the current might be a slow proposition and that proved to be the case right away since recent rains upstream resulted in the Mobile River flowing in some places at 2-1/2 miles per hour.   That made our speed over ground as low as 4-1/2.   We came on an extremely good anchor spot just off the river about the same time as a three day stretch of intermittent heavy rain and lightening so we stayed put and waited for it to pass.    There is some strategy for going up a river.   The river flows fastest in the center so the idea is to stay as close to the bank as possible.   That is also where logs, branches and other river debris accumulates (we saw a whole dead hog floating) and also where the shallow water is.   Also there are eddy currents which make the boat want to turn in the wrong direction.   So to pick up 1 mile per hour or so requires constant steering and checking the depth sounder.   The river is very pleasant.   It is transitioning from the cypress tree of the swamps to the pine trees of the southern forest.   Also we are just brushing the southernmost extent of the Appalachian Mountains so we are seeing rolling hills with occasional rock outcrops.   As we reached Demopolis, AL we had been 9 days without spending a night in a marina or having internet or reliable phone service so we spent a couple of nights to recharge.   Since we left Mobile we had traveled 214 river miles but only 126 miles as the egret flies.