We just got back to Houston from Florence. Arrived here Wednesday afternoon at 4:30 in rush hour traffic and it reinforced one of the main reasons we wanted to leave. Too many people going too many places too fast and all talking on their cell phones.  We were in Florence for about two weeks and got quite a bit accomplished. One on the main reasons was to get some work done on Annie. She has been sitting out in the weather  since August with minimal attention to th varnish. We were able to get four coats of varnish on the cap rail and four coats on the windows on the lower deck. That will take of the lower deck for a while but will have to attack the upper deck on the next trip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work continues on the new property. We were able to get a road cut into the property down to the creek. I am guessing that it is about a quarter mile from the road to where the house will be.

 

There is a high limestone bluff about 80 feet tall overlooking the creek where we are going to put the house. Can’t really tell too much from the image  but it’s almost straight down to the water.  

 

 

Also we have made the arrangements to get a barn shop started. That actually takes priority over the  house in that I need a place to keep the tractor and  the skid steer so I can get the equipment up there and start clearing the land. We will have to do some serious logging on the property just to get enough clear land big enough for the  house and for the barm.

Tony Grigsby is our dirt man. He was having some problems with his bull dozer and was waiting on parts when we left. Hopefully they will  be up and going in a day or two and we can go ahead and get some for of the underbrush and trees cut out.

 

On the lighter side we decided to go play a little on the boat before we left. The Ohio River is still pretty high and we will need to wait out the swift current before we head up river  this spring. The Mississippi was still flooding in areas when we crossed the river at Natchez this morning.  There is a state park on the Tennessee River about 25 miles upstream from Florence. It’s called Joe Wheeler state park and its absolutely beautiful up there and we decided to go up an spend the night . Most of the trip is on Wilson Lake but leaving Florence you have to lock up through Wilson and then do the same at Wheeler Dam which is a mile or so below the park. Locking through the dam is quite an experience. Carol and I have been through the Panama Canal before on a sailboat and the locks there are small compared to the locks at Wilson Dam. The lift at Wilson is 85 feet.

 

 

This is a pictue of Carol with the downstream doors closing behind us. Annie is tied off on the starboard wall of the lock.

As soon as the downstream doors are closed the controller will open the valves  and the water starts flooding in the bottom of the lock which can cause quite a bit of turbulence and the boat has to be well secured.

 

Now the water level starts raising in the lock. The boat is secured to the yellow  bollard that actually floats and rises up with the water level in the lock.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the lock is completely full, the operator lowers the catwalk into the water and then you motor out onto Lake Wilson.

 

 

Locking down is pretty much the same process in reverse. the lock operator fills the chamber with water and when you motor in the water level is the same as lake level. After you tie off and the boaj is secure you notify the lockmaster by radio and he opens the valves and the water level starts dropping. These are some images of going down at Wheeler Dam on the trip home

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each one of the horizontal lines in the cement wall is 5 feet so we have dropped 85 feet.

Once the level of the water in the lock is at downstream  river level they open the down stream gates and you are on your way once again. If there is no traffic, the whole process takes about 20 minutes.

 

And that is how it’s done.  There are quite a few dams in the Tennessee Valley River system. The dams have a two fold function. The first is the production of hydroelectric power for the Tennessee Valley and the second is to maintain navigability of the river. Florence is across the river from Muscle Shoals. Muscle Shoals got its name from  the shoals or shallow water in the river at that loction.  It was so shallow that steamboats could not pass at low water and they would have to be unloaded at Sheffield and goods and passengers  transported over land to a spot above the shoals and then loaded on other steamboats for the remaider of the trip up river. The building of the dam and the dredging of the channel has  maintained almost constant water levels and year round navigability of the Tennessee River.  

One the way home we picked up a little throw-away newspaper which had a little article on southern terminology which I though interesting and it sure applied to Florence.

 

Only a true southrner knows the difference between a hissie fit and a coniption fit and only a southerner knows that you don’t have to have them , you pitch them or throw them.  No one but a true southerner knows the exact number of catfish or croppie there are in a “mess of of fish”. A true southerner can show or point out he general direction of “yonder”. A true southerner knows exactly how long “directly” is as in he’s goin’ to town and gonna be back directly. A true southerner knows that “Gimme some sugar” is not a request for the whitle granular stuff on the table. All true southerners know exacly how long “by and by” is. True southerners grow up knowin’ the difference between “right near” and a “right fer piece”, and they know that “just down the road” means somewhere between one mile and twenty. True southerners both know and understnd the difference between a “redneck”, a “good ole boy” and “po’ white trash”.  No self respecting southerner would ever assume that the car with the flashing turn signal is actually going to make a turn. Southerners know that “fixin” can be noun, verb or adverb, even if they don’t know what those partsof speech mean. We may be actually “fixin’ ” a flat, or fixin’ to get ready to fix it.

True southerners make friends standing in lines. They talk to everybody. Put 100 southerners in a line and half of them will find out they are related if only by marriage. 

True southerners know that grits comes from corn and how to eat them. Southerners know that dinner is served at noon: it is the big meal of the day and that you eat what is left over from dinner at supper.  Southerners know that you never refer to Coke as pop.

Only southerners realize that Southerners never refer to one person as “y’all” …and that the plural of “Y’all” is still “ya’ll” and that the third person plural possessive pronoun is “ya’ll’s meaning that something belongs to more that one of “ya’ll.

Ron and Carol Beberniss back in Texas