Starting down the Tombigbee Waterway

November 5, 2001 - Starting down the Tombigbee Waterway

Bert and Joanne were pleased to hear this morning that Arizona had won the World Series.

It's a BEAUTIFUL,cool, sunny morning. Bill checked to see if the satellite dish that he ordered had arrived - but, no luck. I guess if you need something sent to you somewhere, you might as well forget it. We left Aqua Harbor at 8:45 after calling only to find out that they had sent our dish to Aqua Harbor at 675 Ashley Lane, St. Joseph - so I guess it's sitting at home on the front porch. Ho Hum!

The Tombigbee Waterway that we heard so much about - well, we are on it. We have 54 miles to go today and 3 locks. At 9:45 we came across our first Northbound tow telling us to try not to meet him on the bend and to pass him on 1 whistle, which is port to port. He was the Annapolis, Port of Boston. These barges are much smaller that the ones on the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers. We arrived at the Whitten Lock and locked right through, but, as Joanne put it, it was a bit of a Chinese fire drill at times. I had trouble making the line stay around the bollard. Finally, Bert and I managed to secure it and it was a big drop of 84 feet - the biggest we've had. One down and 11 locks to go. The next one is the Montgomery Lock in 5 miles. We didn't have much time, but we did manage to feed our hungry crew between locks. I make lunch and Joanne cleaned up. We haven't seen any pleasure boats today, even though we know some came this way. They must have left much earlier than we did. Also, we've only seen 1 barge - amazing. We also haven't seen any wild life along the shore - just some fishermen. We always slow way down when we pass the fishermen, or boat launches, or nearby marinas.

The last lock of the day was the Rankin Lock, a drop of 30 feet. Everything went smoothly. We arrived at Midway Marina at 2:45. It was very sunny, warm and very nice. We cleaned up and took the courtesy car to a Super Walmart for a few groceries. It got very dark early, so we had to navigate our way back to the boat in the dark. We grilled steaks for dinner, as the only restaurants nearby were MacDonald type. Enjoyed visiting during dinner after consuming the Sinns and Zerlers bottles of wine.