Back to Chasing Summer

This is what Bruce does when he is landlocked and waiting for a pizza.

   

                                

                                   

We are in the water and back to chasing summer and loving it.  It was getting a little chilly up north.  A little update, we didn’t abandon our plans, but we needed to slow down to avoid the hurricanes that pushed through.  So we arranged to have our bottom painted at Lee Spry Marine in Iuka, MS.  He came with good recommendations and lived up to the reviews we read.  We had a barrier coat, anti-fouling paint, a center board glassed in, a couple of dings repaired and the waterline raised to accommodate the extra weight due to provisioning for long term cruising.  Bill did an excellent job of matching our gel coat to repair the dings and it is very difficult to see where they are.  Excellent work and we will go back when we need a new bottom job. 

We headed south on the ditch as the locals call it, also known as the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. 

This waterway is an amazing feat of engineering.  The Tenn-Tom is a 234 mile man-made waterway that extends from the Tennessee River to the junction of the Black Warrior-Tombigbee River system near Demopolis, Alabama.  Under construction for twelve years by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway was completed in December 1984 at a total cost of nearly $2 billion.  Wikapedia   

                           

                            Google

The Tenn-Tom is the largest building project in the history of the US Army Corps of Engineering!  It is over five times longer than the Panama Canal, and required the moving of over one-third more earth!!  The Tenn-Tom is one of the few man-made structures seen from an orbit of the earth with the naked eye!!!  The Great Wall of China is also one of them. 

We spent the night anchored nestled in a cove off the waterway at MM 412.1 near Cotton Springs.  We were the only boat in the anchorage in a park near the Tenn-Tom Visitors Centers.  Unfortunately I lost the pictures of our beautiful anchorage. The visitor’s center is well worth the visit with lots of information about the Tenn-Tom.  They also provide a dinghy dock. 

                                

Stay tuned, the next post will focus on the locking process for the uninitiated. 

On to Whitten Lock~~~~~~~~~~