Thursday - November 11, 2010

lat 34 32 43, long 88 20 48; fuel 203 gallons; Eng 497.27

Got on the horn first thing this morning to Whitten lock to find out if we could go through. Were told that there was one north bound tow going through and we could go right in after it left. So we hustled over to the lock, waited a half hour and passed through the lock. Altogether, today we passed through 6 locks. It took a bit of time but we did manage to go around 50 miles. The neat thing is the each lockmaster phoned down to the next lockmaster letting him know that we were coming. The locks were opened and ready for us when we arrived. Before we left the rendevous, we heard some negative things about the lockmasters on the Tenn-Tom. However, form my experience, they are great, polite and are very accomodating. The trip down this section of the the Tenn-Tom was very pretty. The leaves are just turning and the day was warm.

Around 3:30 we figured that we should find an anchorage. The place we selected was detailed as having around 10 foot depth. As we pulled in, the bottom fel out, I had about .5 feet under the keel. I quickly backed out and we continued down river to look for another spot. However I was a little leery, and Brenda found a marina off the channel and we decided to go for it. By the time we reached the entrance the sun was setting and it was starting to get dark. We entered the channel which was quite shallow and went a long way into the marina following home made red and green markers. At certain points the depth under my keel was only 2 feet. However we made it to the marina and it was a neat little place - somewhere in the backwoods of Mississippi and probab ly a place I would never visit if I was on a road trip. Important thing was they had a beer and alcohol store - after a few dry county's this was important since we were running out.