This post is retrospective as we have been home for a few days now but I wanted to complete the journey with the blog. This section of the Tennessee between Clifton, Tennessee and Florence Alabama is pretty much devoid of anything that I would call spectacular although a there are a few sandstone bluffs with some architecturally interesting houses along the way. . It’s not unlike the lower Ohio with lots of riverbank with farmlands beyond and not a lot to look at. The bank is speckled with weekend houses and fishing camps mostly populated by weekend residents from western Tennessee. There are a few islands along the way, most of which are pretty good anchorages sheltered from wakes of passing tows, although the commercial traffic on the Tennessee is much less than on the Ohio. The biggest town ipn the section of river is Savannah, Tennessee which boasts a Tennessee River Museum. However there is no place to dock a boat or even land a dinghy in Savannah. Savannah is just north of the site Civil War Battleground at Shiloh and while a significant portion of the artillery and infantry of the North arrived by steamboat at Pittsburgh Landing and the confederates were bombarded by artillery from union gunboats on the Tennessee River, the National Park is hardly distinguishable from the river. There are so signs, no docks or any place to land a dinghy. Unless one is looking at a chart of the area you wouldn’t even know it’s there.
Once we left Clifton we passed only three tows headed downstream the entire day. As we got closer to Pickwick Dam the current kept increasing. When we left Clifton we were doing about 6.8 miles an hour and as we progressed along out boat speed kept dropping. Just below the dam it had dropped to a paltry 4 miles per hour indicating that we had a current on our nose of about 3.5 mph. Seems like we could have made as much forward progress if we had the anchor down. Heading upstream, there is a long sweeping turn on the approach to the dam. As the dam came into view it was pretty clear why we had so much current as most of the gates were open dumping an incredible amount of water into the downstream flow. A few miles below the dam we passed a big tow headed down. As I recall, the name of the vessel was the Winchester, and it was pushing a full house of 15 empties and had another identical push boat tied on his hip that he was taking downstream. We met him on a fairly narrow section of the river, on a turn where there was a buoyed channel. I saw him two miles away and gave him a courtesy call on the radio and asked him where he wanted us to be when we passed, as his control with the current behind him was limited. His response was “out of my way” and then he laughed. We got outside the buoy line until we had safely passed in order to give him a wide berth. As we got closer to the lock we could tell there were no other commercial vessels in the lock by looking at our AIS. We called the lockmaster and he came right back to us and said that the big chamber lower gates were still open from the Winchester s lockage and we wer cleared and to come on in and get tied up which we were only too happy to do, although with the current holding us back, it seemed like we would never get.
We got right through the lock with no problems. Once out on the Pickwick Lake, our boat speed picked back up to over 7 miles per hour. Pickwick Landing State Park Marina is only about 2 miles from the dam. There is a buoyed channel in, which I would hate to have to find in the dark if I was not familiar with it. Even in daylight the small buoys are hard to pick up even with binoculars. For the mariners who keep their boats there and use the channel frequently it’s probably not an issue, but for those of us who venture in there infrequently, it can be a bit of a challenge. We had called ahead to let them know we were coming and even though it was a weekend day we were the only transient boat there. The attendant came out to help us tie up. I guess he probably had fair warning we were coming in as we fired up the calliope as we entered the basin. We got tied up and settled in for the evening. It was late afternoon when we got there but we had some time before our guests arrived at 5:30 and we proceeded to work on the deck leak. We had purchased some more material for the patch while we were in Paris , Tennessee and as we had rain in the forecast we wanted to get it put down and dry before we tested its integrity. We used foam insulation board with double sided foil and put it down with silicone instead of water based caulk. I selected that because it was cheap, light, easy to bend and cut and I thought the silicone would adhere to the aluminized foil surface.
Fred Meyers and his wife Joan have cruised over 30,000 miles on the Rivers of Alabama and Tennessee and wrote the definitive cruising guides to the Tennessee River and the Cumberland Rivers. They are well seasoned boaters with lots of interesting stories and full of information. They spent the night with us on Friday night and traveled with us the 50 odd miles to Florence Harbor on Saturday. It was good to have some knowledgeable company with us and they gave us lots of pointers on anchorages and pitfalls along the river as we passed. The day started off sunny and clear but by early afternoon had become overcast but we did not get the rain we expected, so out patch at this point remains unproven.
There are some interesting remnants on the river of the days before our modern high hydroelectric dams when the Tennessee River was not navigable along the section. Below Florence there are the remains of old stone canals that were dredged to facilitate the passage of steamboats upriver. Some of these old canal remnants are visible above water and some are submerged providing significant hazards to the unwary boater. The entire area is referred to Muscle Shoals. The term “Shoals” is derived from the fact that the river along here was almost 20 miles of rapids and was impassable most of the year. Many steamboats and packets met their fate on the rocks in the river at Muscle Shoals. Goods arriving here by steamboat were offloaded at Sheffield Landing just downstream from Florence and transported by rail up toward Decatur where they could be safely loaded back on steamboats to continue the journey up river to Chattanooga and Knoxville via the river. .
We arrived at Florence late afternoon and got Annie safely tied up and plugged in. We have another 25 miles to go to Joe Wheeler State Park where we keep her making the journey of almost 3000 miles complete. We were tired from the day’s journey and decided to spend the last night on the boat. The next day we went to the house to see what shape things were in and to access what we would need to do to return to our lives ashore. The dining room table was piled high with mail and packages of things I had ordered for the boat. When we left in August we had lists on top of lists of things to take to the boat, things to buy and things to do. And now as we return to living ashore we have lists on top of lists of things to do, groceries to buy and things to bring home from the boat. Some things never change.
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