Days 173

Bobby's Fish Camp - Tensaw River Anchorage

• Start 6:30 AM
• End 4:05 PM
• Underway 9 Hours
• Distance 84 miles
• Total Miles on Trip 3570
• Av Speed 7.0 knots
• Locks 1
• Weather Sunny , 73 Degrees, Wind 12 Knts S

YEA!!! we have done our last lock for several months. At 7:15 this morning we pulled into the Coffeeville Lock on the Tenn-Tom waterway, and at 8:05am we pulled out and we were back to sea level. In all reality the locks are not difficult to do at all, at least not after travel through 89 of them.

Today's travel was required paying a lot more attention than the last oh say 3000 miles. This section of the Tenn-Tom is almost all twist and turns, there are no channel markers (The charts have them, but they are not physical present), and if you stray out of the channel it gets shallow very quickly. There were six of us traveling down river together, two of them ran aground, and two more found themselves in places with less than two feet of water under their boats. Fortunately both Kay Dee and Nothing To Plunder never saw less than seven feet of water. We also had to pass a couple of tows, that required waiting for a straight section of river, because the tows need the entire width of the river in the bends.

We did see our first alligator of the trip today, but it was too far away to get a picture. Hopefully we will see more tomorrow.

Because we were able to get through the last lock very quickly, we arrived at our planned anchorage by 1:30pm. It was too early to stopped, so we continued on another 30 miles to the TenSaw River. The risk of doing this was not reaching the TenSaw before sunset at 4:50pm , and there are not any other safe options before there.

We are now 30 miles from Mobile Bay where we will stay at the Mobile Convention Center Public Dock.