The run down to Florence went as planned. Takes about 3-1/2 hours if we don’t get hung up at a lock with a commercial tow. We locked through Wheeler Dam and Wilson Dam with minimal waiting. Ron Cowan was on board and is my auto-pilot. He loves to be at the helm which is great because it bores me to death. He doesn’t like locking the boat through or docking so when that comes up I am back at the helm. Ron ran the boat while I put stuff away. When we left Joe Wheeler Park where we keep the boat we unloaded our lockers and dock boxes and stacked everything on the aft deck. I spent most of the run down to Florence putting stuff away and stacking it in piles to be stowed somewhere later. Stowing it is not the problem…its trying to remember where you put it sometime in the future when you need it. We found that things on a boat tend to migrate around until they find their natural home. Annie is a pretty big boat with lots of storage space, which means there are more places to put things which sometimes makes them harder to find. Carol and I are getting ready to head to the boat at Florence Harbor and head down to Iuka, about a 40 mile run. Will take most of the day to get there. The river is pretty wide along here with gentle hills sloping down to the water, interrupted by occasional creeks and sloughs. The river is sparsely populated downstream. No towns on the river between Iuka and Florence and the only way across the river is the Natchez Trace Bridge about 15 miles downstream . We will be staying at J.P. Coleman State Park Marina tonight and don’t know if we will have internet access there.
Amazing how best made plans change. We called ahead and made reservations at Coleman State Park and gave them a credit card number. When we got there it was further from the boat yard than we wanted to be for an early morning run to the yard and we decided to go about 10 miles further down the river. So we called back and tried to cancel the reservation. The girl at the desk said that our credit card had already been charged and they couldn’t reverse it. Well, not wanting to blow off 60 bucks we decided to go ahead and stay at Coleman. We motored into the marina and found (1) the slip they had for us was 20 feet wide which is one foot wider than the boat. That leaves 6″ on either side of the boat. Maybe could make it in there if I had a 55 gallon drum of K-Y jelly handy and the wind wasn’t blowing. (2) the slip was covered with a roof and was about 5 feet to low for us to get under, and (3) they only had 30 amp power on the dock which means we couldn’t run the air conditioning. So we had a long talk with the head dog at the park and got our money back. Nothing of major consequence happened today. Carol took the wheel most of the day while I fixed stuff and rebuilt pumps. And put stuff away. Got most everything stowed for the trip and have a big pile of stuff to leave here that we won’t need that’s just taking up space. This is actually the first time we have really fired up everything on the boat and ran it for long periods, four air conditioners and all of the associated pumps, engines, generators.
Looked at the charts tonight really for the first time and sort of planned the run down to the Ohio. Well, the run down is really the run up. Heading north but going downstream. We’re currently in Yellow Creek at mile 215 on the Tennessee. We go down the Tennessee River to about mile 25 where we take the Barclay canal over to Lake Barclay on the Cumberland River. That puts us about 30 miles from the Ohio River and if all goes well should take us four days, unless we decide to stop and smell the roses along the way in which case it might just take us two weeks…but….who cares???
Tomorrow we pull the boat and are hoping for no surprises…but who knows… It is a wooden boat and if there an issue, it could kill the trip. So we just hope!
Voyages of Annie 