Sunday, October 30, 2011

Hot Tub Halloween

We left Grand Harbor on Friday morning. Nice place. We're now off the Tennessee River and in the Tombigbee Waterway. This canal was cut in the 70's, connecting the Tennessee & the Black Warrior Rivers, it was a bigger project than the Panama canal. We anchored out Friday night above the Whitten lock & dam. The temps dropped into the 30's but we stayed very warm by baking spaghetti squash in the oven. Toasty warm. We re-warmed up the boat by baking muffins in the morning. We did much better at staying warm than I expected.

Weather like this generates fog, a LOT of fog. Luckily it lifts fairly fast once the sun comes up. We got underway to the Whitten lock around 9am. This lock down is an 87' drop, the largest lock we'll travel. It's BIG! We shared the lock with 4 other boats, the largest pack to date. There are a string of locks along the Tombigbee and they like to coordinate lockings. So we 5 all traveled together to 2 more locks. Freedom was the slowest boat in the group but we didn't really hold up the pack by more than about 10 minutes.
We dropped out of the pack to stop at Midway Marina, they all pushed on further. We're glad we did. Stopping earlier in the day gives us some time off the boat, always nice to get out and stretch the legs. Midway was hosting a Saturday night Halloween party for their seasonals & us transients. So we got some free food, some time to hang out with the locals, a great costume display and some live music. Plus we met up with a new pack of boaters that came in after us. We'll all form up in the morning to lock down several more locks on Sunday. We topped off the evening with a dip in the marina hot tub, under a crisp starry night. WOW, that was the hottest hot tub I've ever soaked in!

Of course, it is another foggy morning. I'm getting some computer work done while we have good internet. Fog will lift soon enough.

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