Monday, October 12, 2020

Swimming Upstream

Since our last post, we have said goodbye to Kentucky, spent a few days in Tennessee, spent a few minutes in Alabama, and are now anchored in Mississippi.  We moved south by 165 (as the crow flies), but traveled 215 miles of meandering rivers to get here.  We have been anchored in 5 different places, and spent 2 nights at Aqua Yacht Marina (time for our monthly reprovisioning & pumpout). It feels good to be on the move again!

Our final Land Between the Lakes anchorage was in Panther Bay.  This anchorage is in Tennessee, and was on our short list of anchorages because of the hiking trails.  

Pickett Loop was a 3 mile trail that offered a nice combination of interior forest and shoreline.

Yay...there’s our girl, we could see her, but we still had to walk around this cove to get to where we left the Whaler on the other side.  This felt like a long 3 miles!

It’s getting cold here.  We woke up to 48° three mornings in a row. It is time to head south!  The cold air and relatively warm water creates a very dense fog at night, but each morning we were treated to the beautiful ‘smoke on the water’.  Also, this dense condensation wreaked havoc on my teak job.

Before we begin our journey south Keith dives the bottom to scrape the running gear and change the anodes.  He ended up scraping much more than the running gear thanks to a strange black mat type of growth on the hull.

What’s wrong with this picture?  Take a look at the three barges in the front...yep, they are on the beach.  We aren’t sure how this push boat got into this situation, as he was well outside the channel.  It’s possible he pulled out of the channel to sleep for the night and woke up to a much lower water level.  They seemed to be lowering the lake levels in preparation for the rain expected from hurricane Delta. 

We came upon him around 10:00 a.m., about an hour into our trip.  Keith was at the helm and he saw a lot of water disturbance coming from the back of the push boat, but we weren’t sure what he was doing because he didn’t appear to be moving. Keith radioed and asked permission to cross behind the boat. The captain replied, “come on ahead, but don’t come where I am because I’m stuck!”...and stuck he was!  That night we dropped the anchor at 6:00, approximately 55 miles south of this location, and we heard the lock master warn a northbound barge that this boat was still stuck...poor guy, 8 hours later he was still in the same spot.

In case you were wondering how they are able to get 1200 ft of barges through a 600 ft lock, we were lucky enough to capture this satellite picture of the process in action.  They push the first three rows (9 total) of barges into the lock and unhook them from the push boat and other barges. The push boat backs out so the gates can close.  Once the first set of barges are raised/lowered they get pulled out of the lock with a motorized pulley system.  The lock then returned for the remaining barges and push boat.  Once they get through they reconnect and go on their way...COOL!

I know 40 ft is enough space for us to fit under that railroad bridge, but it just doesn’t look high enough from this angle.  Also, I’m not really a fan of crossing under while a train is going over.  It’s a little irrational, but I feel like if something is going to go wrong it’s going to go REALLY wrong with the added variable of the train😬

If you are looking at this picture and yelling at me for being on the wrong side of the channel, let me explain.  Usually, channels are transited like roads where each vehicle stays to the right. However, heading into a sharp bend in the river I could see this barge was nearing the bend from the opposite direction thanks to the AIS system on my chart plotter (I could not yet see him with my eyes). Considering the narrow channel, sharp bend, and strong current I wanted to make sure I was well out of his way.  I radioed the captain and asked him where he would like me to be when I came out of the bend. He requested that I cross the channel to “get on up in that bend, and pass on the 2”! My reply, “copy that, pass on the 2”, which means ‘I will leave you to my starboard’.  So you see, I am not on the wrong side of the channel...I am just getting out of the way👍
Earlier in the day Keith had a similar situation, when he was at the helm, but that captain asked him to stop right where we were and wait for him to pass.  Since there was a second barge right behind the first we just held station until both push boats got out of the bend.

I mentioned strong currents, well this is what it looks like to swim upstream.  At times our speed was down to 5.2 mph running at 1750 rpm. Luckily, as soon as we locked up into Pickwick lake we were making 8.4 mph at 1550 rpm.  That was the last of our upstream journey.  The entire rest of our trip to the Gulf of Mexico will be downstream.

Can’t blame this one on the river.



And here comes Delta, our third hurricane this season. Thankfully, once again we will only see a day of rain.

And rain it did! 

We will spend the remainder of October exploring Bay Springs Lake.
























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