We left the anchorage at 7:11 this morning.  It was 45°, again, we stayed warm all night.  The cat always sleeps with me at night, his added warmth helped keep me warm, Gary was on his own :).

We got both anchors up today without much trouble.  Gary had to “strong-arm” the back anchor up.  Those $75 head sets we bought have really come in handy when ever we dock or anchor.  Worth every penny!

See these smoke stacks from a power plant?

Power Plant

We passed those stacks 5 times!  Gives you some idea how many bend there are in this river.

When we got to mile 20 on the Tenn-Tom, our Garmin started looking like this

Garmin at mile 20

We lost our sailing line, the mile markers and any info about what we were passing.

Luckily, we had downloaded Navionic’s for our I-pad.  For about $50 I would suggest any boater download it.  The detail on it is wonderful and as long as your I-pad is cell phone capable (so it has GPS), you don’t need to have internet coverage for it once you download all the maps.  Here is what Navionic’s looked like

Navionic’s

The shoreline changed quite a bit the closer we got to Mobile Bay.  It almost started looking swampy.  Here is what the shoreline looked like as we got closer to Mobile Bay

Shoreline

We finally arrived at Mobile Bay at 12:00.  We saw our 1st dolphin at 12:30.  Cool!  We are really down south now 🙂  This is really a “working” bay.  Many massive ships and navels ships.  I took a bunch of pictures, I’ll post some of them under the pictures page.  The Bay is really shallow if you don’t stay in the channel.  We stayed in the shipping lane and then found the channel marker to Dog River.  You had to follow the channel markers very closely as it was really shallow going into the marina.  Of course we always seem to be coming into the marinas as low tide which makes it extra tricky, but of course if we make it in at low tide, we’ll be able to make it out.  They are green and red markers are on telephone poles.  Each one is numbered.  Some of them have lights but after listening to the Coast Guard update, quite a few of them don’t have working lights.  The wind can also be a factor.  Today it was blowing out of the north which also blows the water out of the marina.  We had to be very careful when traveling thru the channel and made sure to stay in the middle.  We tied up to their transient dock.  Dockage cost us nothing because they had a “Looper” deal that if you took on fuel, your dockage was free.  Gary didn’t want to add anymore fuel to the boat but at $3.61 a gallon, we could hardly pass it up so we put on 200 gallons and got a free pump out too.  We were able to walk around the marina and look at all the boat, in and out of the water.  I have uploaded some of the pictures on the picture page.

OMG, look….is that who we think it is?

Problem Boat

That is the boat we met when we stopped at Green Turtle, the one that had all the troubles.  We had to check.  Apparently they were coming into this marina and the wind was blowing and it pushed them out of the channel.  They ran aground and BoatUS had to go get them (they certainly have been getting their monies worth from their policy :)).  The people from the marina told the owner of the boat he really needed to add more fuel to get to his final destination of Cape Coral and they also told him he should hire a professional Captain.  I agree, this poor guy really needs some help if he wants to get his boat to Florida.  Apparently he has docked his boat for now and will come back in the spring and try again.  We’ll see if we run into him again.

We ran into this fellow when we were walking around.  He’s the marina dog.

Marina Dog

His name is Diesel.  They told us he was friendly but because people are scared of such a big dog, they put a muzzle on him.  I think he looks a lot scarier with the muzzle on him and with his shock collar.  He reminds me of that guy in the movie Hannibal  He was very friendly but very big.  Once you started petting him he didn’t want you to stop.

We were able to walk around the marina.  They do quite a bit of boat repair here and there were a lot of cool boats in the area.  I have posted some of those boats in the More Pictures page.

Here are a couple of pictures from night time

Marina at Night

Another Night picture

Well better sign off, big day tomorrow, our final run to Orange Beach Marina.