We left our anchorage around 7:00, the temperature this morning was 39°.  We both stayed surprisingly warm last night.  We don’t like to run the generator during the night, don’t want to be asphyxiated, you know.

It was foggy in the morning but we got right into our first and only lock of the day.

Fog

We have noticed with most of the locks on the TennTom, the Lock Master gives you instructions, enter at slow speed, whoever is working the lines should have a Coast Guard approved life jacket on, notify him when we are secure.  Gary and I have always made it a habbit to wear our life jacket when out on deck.  Better to be safe than sorry.  We have also noticed that right before they drop the water, they sound a siren.  Sounds like an air raid siren.

With the bollards in these locks, Gary always told me never to tie the boat to the bollard, you just wrap your line around the bollard and then loop the line thru the cleat on the boat

Tie to the Bollard

That way if the bollard doesn’t move, your boat won’t be hanging from the line if you can’t cut it.  Well today I saw first hand what he was talking about.  After the Lock Master sounded the alarm, our boat started going down but the bollard wasn’t moving.  I waited a little bit to make sure it wasn’t moving before I told Gary.  He called the Lock Master, the Lock Master said he would stop the drop and we should move to another bollard.  I removed our line (we tie off to the cleat that is in the middle of our boat), by the time the rear of our boat was next to the bollard, the bollard was probably as high as our roof.  Suddenly……it dropped.  Swoosh!  Splash!  The bollard almost went totally under water!  Geez Louise!  That could have caused some real damage to the boat not to mention I’d have to go change my shorts!  Another lesson learned in the locks.

We passed a town called Epes, AL where there were some white cliffs on the banks.  Very pretty

White Sand Cliff

More White Sand cliff

Smokie has been getting more and more comfortable on the boat

Smokie

Here he is enjoying some sunshine :).

As you travel down, you can see along the river where the bank has just given way and people have lost structures.  Here, looks like someone lost their shed.

Bye Bye Shed

I wonder if that is covered by insurance?

We are staying at the Demopolis Yacht Basin marina, $69.38.

Marina

Very nice marina.  Most of it is covered.  We were able to do some laundry here too.  Not too bad $1.25 per load.  That is something that can vary, from $1.00 a load to $2.00 a load.  We had to go to the laundry mat when we stayed at Aqua right before we left because they shut off the water to the bathrooms and laundry.  That was expensive :(.

The have a golf cart at the marina you can use to get over to the gas dock where we had to go to pay.  They told us to go ahead and use it.  Ooooooh, now that sounds like fun :).  I took the wheel and we started off, as we drove we saw the road we should take to get to the gas dock but with the abundance of rain they have had and the fact that there were big dump trucks working that area, the road looked like fresh gooey mud.  No way was I going to drive thru that!  I’m not getting out and pushing the cart thru that when it got stuck!  So I took the side of the 45 MPH road.  We got to the gas dock and paid and found out we were not to take the golf cart on the road because it wasn’t street legal, whoops!  So Gary drove back to the marina.  When we got to the muddy part he just kicked it.  Mud was flying everywhere but we made it across.  No mud on us but the cart was a mess.   We just parked it in it’s spot and sneaked away.

We had an early night because we had a big day tomorrow so we hit the rack early.  Night Night.