During our road trip, we devised a plan to meet Jacob’s girlfriend Regan in Columbus, MS. Columbus, MS is a 20 minute car drive from Mississippi State University (where Regan attends for a Masters in Archaeology.) Being a long weekend, Jacob could make the trek from Ada, OK to meet us. A plan was set, now we just needed make the 202 Nautical Mile (28 hours) cruise from Pebble Isle Marina in TN to Columbus Marina in MS in 4 days while timing 8 locks and some rainy weather.
The rain from Memphis followed us to Pebble Isle with torrential downpours during the night. The rain continued into the AM, but that did not stop us from making a mad dash across the dock for hot, delicious cinnamon rolls. We returned the rental car and took on 150 gallons of diesel for Three Sons. The prediction was that the the rain and wind was coming to an end early morning, so we decided to take a chance and leave the marina mid-day to get some miles behind us. Not the best day to travel, still a little windy, rainy and dreary, but we moved south 26 NM to Denison Island and dropped the hook. Of course, because it was downpouring, we had trouble getting the anchor to set! We can’t complain about the rain, because over the last 6 months we can count on hand the amount of hours we have seen rain. Eventually, the anchor took hold and we settled in for the night. Over the next two days, we traveled from sun up to sun down (10 hours each day) with a total of 7 locks and continued 140 miles south on the Tombigbee River!
For some reason, we needed to do lots of reading to understand ‘the river system’ that we are traveling. The last part of this system takes us through Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. After leaving the Tennessee River, we cruise The Tenn-Tom (Tennessee Tombigbee) Canal and then the Black-Warrior-Tombigbee Waterway ending in Mobile Bay. The Tenn-Tom, is a 234-mile man-made waterway that extends from the Tennessee River to the Tombigbee River connecting major inland ports from Paducah, Kentucky to Knoxville, Tennessee. This waterway shortens the route for commercial (and personal) vessels by 720 miles. In order to solidify the geography of the rivers, Three Sons needed to draw out a map to help our understanding! We sketched something, but no true visual representation could be drawn with the amount of curves, twist and turns. We are traveling south but sometime we are moving north to get south!
The Ten-Tom Waterway has 10 locks, each 110′ x 660′ with floating bollards. The first lock has the biggest drop of 84′ then the rest are around 30 feet each. We have pulled Three Sons into about 150ish locks so far, and these have have been some of the easiest. The only challenge is communicating with the lock masters between the New England and Southern accents, we might as well be speaking a forgein language. An added bonus is that thankfully, this part of the rivers have had a lot less tows and commercial traffic.
Our boat sticker was added to one bollard in the 10 locks. Over the next few days Tracy was delighted to get text and picture from fellow boaters who tied up to this bollard! The simple things bring joy.
Since the canal is man-made, there are many tree stumps submerged in the bottom of the rivers. Since we will using the anchor a lot in these parts, we switched out our brand new anchor for our older model. This way if we need to cut it loose, we lose the old anchor. This was very wise information passed on to us from a friend whose anchor got stuck and he hacksawed it off, leaving his new anchor in the bottom of the river. Our newer anchor sits on the bow until we are done with the rivers.
We made it to Columbus Marina as planned and had a wonderful day and half with Jacob, Pepper Mae and Regan. Regan greeted us with yummy chocolate chip homemade cookies and a bag of treats from MSU agriculture center. We spent time on Three Sons playing games, toured MSU campus, Starkville and Columbus. Pepper Mae spent a night on Three Sons with us but was unimpressed and curled up in the recliner for the night. Certainly, on a big highlight was meeting and getting to know Regan.
