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.
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