As we continue our travels up river we notice how far the water has dropped

See how far the water was up?

You can see how the bottom of the trees doesn’t have any color.  This is where the water level was a few weeks ago.  We are very happy it has dropped, makes it a lot easier for us.  I think so far, we have had less debris on the river than we had coming down.  Lets hope this continues for the rest of our return voyage.

We had a easy sail with little debris and we made it to the 2nd anchorage around 4:00. After dinner I did get Gary to play Dominos Chicken Feet.  Hey Mikey!  He likes it!  Oh boy, that is 2 games I can get him to play.  By the time I am done I may have a Canasta partner :).

We’re all settled in for the night and it was getting pretty dark when a guy in duck boat came into our anchorage and started shining a light into the trees.  Keep in mind that the water is still about 10 feet over where it should be so all you could see is a bunch of trees sitting in water.  There is a boat ramp behind us so I figured maybe he was going there.  He passed the area of the boat ramp and kept going, shining his light from shore to shore.  A few minutes passed and I heard a gun shot.  What the hell?  Gary tells me not to worry, he is probably hunting something.  Sure he is ;).  What are you hunting when the water is so high?  I’ll feel a lot better when they guy leaves this anchorage.  I’m locking the doors and sleeping with my gun tonight :).

We woke the next morning.  Luckily no one shot us in the middle of the night :).  The bottom was extremely muddy, Gary was not happy about that.  We had to put out two anchors last night and both are coming up really muddy.  Gary is having to use the fresh water hose to clean them off.  Looks like we’ll have to conserve on water as we have another anchorage tonight to get thru.  That means no washing of dishes or showering.   Hopefully we don’t draw too many flies as we travel :).

We have a short drive today, only 45 miles to a place called Bashe Creek.  We got thru Coffeeville Damn today with no problem.  The new docking stick I made worked out real well.  It was originally a window cleaner/squeegee.  I just unscrewed the cleaner part and kept the hard plastic stick.  It can even double as a billy stick if need be 🙂

As we were traveling and following our Bread Crumbs on the Garmin, we noticed some gaps in them.  Here is a picture of the Garmin with a gap in it.

Garmin and our Bread Crumbs

See the little dashes?  Those are our Bread Crumbs from when we came down in January.  See the break in the Break Crumbs?  We must have met a  barge on that corner.  As we were traveling with one engine on the way down, when we’d run into a barge, we’d have to start the other engine and when we did that we had to shut down the Garmin while we started up the other engine.  We had to do that because of the power serge from starting the engine shut off the Garmin and I didn’t think that was very good for it.  So we shut off the Garmin before we start the engine. That’s what caused the break in our Bread Crumbs.  Pretty neat huh?

There were a bunch of swallows following our boat and dive bombing right in front.  We must have been kicking up bugs and they were having a feast.  We also saw this bird

Bird – Swallow Tailed Kite

It would dive right into the water and then fly away, kind of like the pelicans.  I’ve never seen a bird like this before.  Pretty cool though.

We noticed some trees with new vines on them.  Last time they were all dead and brown.  Much prettier now

Vines on Trees

We’ve only seen one boat on our trip

Our traveling buddy

They passed us like we were standing still.  Well…..we are sipping fuel and they are guzzling it. (More about him later ;))

Here is a dock that got washed away in the flood, watch that first step…..

Broken Dock

Well we got to Bashe Creek around 2:00.  We had taken our time as we knew we didn’t have far go go.  Big mistake.  The anchorage is way too narrow for us.  There was a guy on the shore that was fishing.  He was looking as us like “Do you really think you are going to fit in there?”.  Crap!  There are no more anchorages that Gary feels comfortable using from here to Demopolis.  That means a 70 mile run in 5 hours and we have to get thru a lock.  So much for sippin the diesel, time to start chugging it :(. Not much choice, so we push the girls up to 2400 and we are traveling at 16.4 knots.  This is the fastest I  have traveled on the boat for this long of a time.  And guess what?  The cat is loving it!  He is sprawled out on the salon floor.  Who’d a thunk?

Our one and only boat, Off Call, ended up staying a consistent 1 1/2 ahead of us.  He was quite surprised to see us behind him on one of the straight aways. We both made it to the lock by 5:45 and we were out by 6:05.  We both pulled up to the gas dock at Demopolis.  It turns out they were are a couple of guys doing a delivery from Dustin, Florida to Chattanooga, Tennessee.  They had ordered a part for their generator and needed to pick it up at Demopolis.  We both got a slip for the night.  We were tied up in our slip by 7:00.  After traveling our longest stretch of 113 miles,  we decided to take a break  and stay at Kingfisher Bay Marina an extra day.

One thing I did learn about the way we usually travel is that we are able to take pictures, take notes, and enjoy the experiences so I can have some interesting little tid bits for the blog.  Otherwise while we were beating feet to get here, all I had time for was to sit next to Gary and watch the instruments and look for debris in the water.  No time for sight seeing going that fast.  We would have missed all those interesting sights on the rivers.  Besides, it’s the journey, not just the destination and after all, we are retired :).

The next morning we looked at the weather and found there is a really nasty weather system heading our way and it will be hitting here Sunday and staying thru Tuesday or Wednesday.  As our next stop is an anchorage, we have decided to play it safe and stay till the storms, three of them, pass thru.  We are hoping there won’t be too much flooding by the time it is done.

So I am sitting here, updating the blog and listening to the worst lightening storm I have even been in in quite some time.  Lots of sky to ground lightening strikes.  Big booms.  The cat is hiding in his window again.  The lightening strikes seem really close.  Good thing we have a sail boat next to us to serve as our lightening rod.  They’ll get hit first before us :).

Well, I’ll stop for now and update later as we get back underway to our ultimate destination, Aqua Yacht Harbor.  Stay safe and have a good week.