Saturday - October 9, 2010

Lat 035 45 023; long 088 00 44 fuel 149 gallons, engine 416.39

There was a ground fog around the boat this morning so we had to wait until the sun came up long enough to burn it off the river. The last thing you want is to travel blind on the river with the boats and tugs.

The first part of the trip was quite pretty with stone walls and little in the way of towns, houses or cottages. However as we went further south on the river, cottages or houses became the norm and the scenery was not as good as the first 40 miles of today's trip. Some of the houses were perched on top of a cliff so that there was quite drop to the water. Quite often you could see how much the river has dropped with the ladders not quite reaching the water by about 5 feet. The water Kentucky Lake, the Tennessee and the other lakes controlled by the Tennessee Valley Authority is regulated and they start dropping the water level sometime in the middle the summer. Right now it is about 5 feet less than the standard. Consequently you do have to watch your depths through a calculations that compare normal level above sea level at each dam to current level. This difference, then reduces the calculated depths along the route. Depths are not shown but rather height above sea level is shown on the charts. The difference between the sea level at the dam and that shown for any particular point on the chart is the normal depth for that point and then you adjust for the previously noted variance. If you don't understand this, it also took me some time also.

We met a couple of barges as we traveled along but the trip was rather uneventful. We originally wer going to stop at mile 171 but I didn't like the look of the anchorage and we went a further 20 miles to Wolfe Island, which is a nice little anchorage sheltered from the river. We anchored in 20 feet of water.

Once we settled in, we took the dinghy and traveled around Wolfe Island and a couple of smaller islands. Interesting thing is the water remains about 20 feet deep right to shore. There is very little gradation in the depth. I wanted Brenda to get out but she was unwilling to make the leap to shore.

When we got back, I put on the scuba tank and went under the boat. Sometime in the last few days, the dinghy tie up line got wrapped around the propeller and it had to be cut off. Fortunately the line was not very thick so it was easy to do and no damage occurred to the prop or the shaft.

Tomorrow we have a short trip to Pickwick Lock and Dam and then we will continue down the river towards Chattanooga.

lat 035 12 99 long 88 17 60