The southern part of the Tom Bigbee

Well, I was going to publish this yesterday, Friday, November 21, but I was so busy doing chores that it didn’t get done. We went to a captains meeting for getting through the Demopolis, Alabama lock. The lock requires a signup sheet to be completed by the Kingfisher Marina where we were staying. They only allow locking through at 6 am, 8, 10, and noon. The day before the lock only allowed the 6 am group to go through so there was a large group of boaters that wanted to go today and most signed up for the 6 am locking. Personally, I think having to do a 6 am locking is just plain abusive. You have to leave the marina at 5:15 to get to the lock on time and the sunrise is not until 6:30 am. So, boaters get to travel in the dark, 3 miles to the lock in a log infested river. The other reason for us to do the 6:00 am locking is where the good anchorages are located. The first one where boats are out of the river is 71 miles from the marina. We were on the 6:00 am list for locking.

The wakeup alarm went off at 4:15 am. We got the coffee brewed, electric cord in, lines untied and backed out of our slip at 5:30 am. We were the second boat heading out, so we followed him figuring if there was a log to hit, he would find it first.

The lockmaster was quite helpful giving us directions to working floating bollards. It took about a half an hour to drop 40 feet down on the Tombigbee River. We are trying to make 93 miles to the second good anchorage on the river. We anticipate another long day on the river getting in about 20 minutes before sunset.

Another day, another long cruise, We traveled 93 nautical miles to a place called Turkey Creek for anchoring. This anchorage was interesting. We traveled about a half mile down this creek with downed trees showing on both sides before coming into a lake. Our friends from Oregon were anchored ahead of us and we went around them. Our Rochna anchor has not been working as advertised, so we dropped our anchor about a hundred yards away from them. Our Canadian friends asked us to go for a dinghy ride up the river to see the bayou which we took them up n. When we got back our boat had moved. Dog gone it. Now we had to re-anchor in the dark. We reset our rochna and placed a stern danforth anchor out. We held all night. Yes!

The southern Tombigbee River has no marinas so we are anchoring yet again. We ended up seeing our friends from Oregon in the next creek. We had another 90 mile day and arrived at dusk. We found decent anchoring in Three rivers creek.

We woke to fog. Not just fog, but FOG. It was very thick. We had to follow the breadcrumbs on our chart plotter to get out of the anchorage. Two other boats were scheduled to go out before us. However, when we were ready to leave, they were still on anchor due to the fog. We up anchored and headed down the creek to the main river. It was so foggy we had a difficult time getting by the boat that had anchored at the head of the river. They were draped across the channel leaving little room for other boats to get by. Once we were out in the river, it was pea soup and very nasty. It turned out that we were the lead boat going through the haze. We felt we could go no faster than 5 knots and had Bev stationed on the bow to look for navigation markers.

After about two hours, the other two boats passed us. The fog had cleared enough to see across the river, so we followed at the higher speed. Finally, the fog lifted with the heat off of the rising sun.

I am sorry to say, that Mobile, Alabama is not very exciting. We cruised through downtown Mobile and there was commercial traffic traveling all sorts of directions.

There were a lot of dolphin tour boats running around too. We ended up in a marina that appeared to be in a suburb of Mobile for the night. The marina was rough, but cheap. We had a restful sleep and were trying to get to the gulf intercoastal and a Safe Harbor marina in Orange Beach, Alabama the next day.

Oh my what a rough day it was. We had 11 miles of 3 foot wave on our bow. Bouncy, bouncy.. It took us about 4 hours to get out of Mobile and into the Gulf intercoastal. Then, another 2 hours to get to our next marina, Safe Harbor Sportsman which was located in Orange Beach, Alabama. Orange Beach is a place where sunbirds flee from snow. There are a lot of condo high-rises and white sand beaches. Unfortunately,

foul weather came in with below freezing temperatures where we had left the van in Iuka, Ms. We decided to stay an extra 3 days, rent a car to pick up the van.