Testing Our Mettle

So the day started off well. MacGyver did "fix" the coffee carafe so coffee was flowing and all was good in our world. We left our anchorage behind Rondeau Island before the sun came up.

There you are!

At Ohio River mile marker 922, we left the Ohio and turned into the Cumberland.

  

Goodbye Ohio River!



Hello Cumberland River!

You will notice that the Cumberland River is much narrower than the Ohio River. An important point to make here is that normally most of the barges would enter the Tennessee River off the Ohio vs. the Cumberland. Unfortunately, the lock (Kentucky Lock & Dam) in the Tennessee River is down for repairs the so the barges are using the Cumberland River, locking through the Barkley Dam. When we want to pass a barge, it is important to call the captain on the radio and ask his preference for your passing. In the case below, he asked Alan to pass him on the "two" which means we pass starboard to starboard (starboard is the right side of the boat facing forward, port is the left).

So just when we thought we were settled in on the Cumberland River, we lost our radar and depth finder. The depth piece was the really unsettling part. We knew depths were good in the Cumberland but once past Barkley Dam, who knows? So after a little detective work we saw that the battery was low on our VHF marine radio which was strange. We turned on the generator and the electronics came back to life. Whew. Alan discovered that a breaker had tripped, so electronics had been pulling too much power from the house battery. Still working to better understand why the breaker tripped but we were running a lot off the inverter and the batteries may have just been getting too low. All good now, we will watch how things go tomorrow. Have the generator as a back up if we need to turn it on tomorrow. We have been trying not to run it while we are underway. But the salon gets crazy hot and I'm sure the inverter is in high gear keeping the fridge and freezer working.

So now the race was on to get past another large barge and get to Barkley Dam to lock through before he does. Commercial barges have priority so if he got there first, we could be waiting for hours.

The lockmaster was just ready to call us in when we heard that barge radio in for a lock through. The good news is we still got to lock through. The bad news is that we had to share the lock with the monster barge! Joe and Kim, the tow was from Houston so we are never too far from you guys.

Here he comes, approaching the lock

The barge went in first. They are very nervous about the recent oil spill in Whitten Lock on the Tombigbee River so didn't want us in there first. Once they got tied up to the wall, we came alongside them.

As we came out of the lock, we were on beautiful Barkley Lake. We pulled into Green Turtle Bay Marina, did some laundry, took a swim at the pool and had a nice catfish dinner at the Thirsty Turtle Restaurant (no, the catfish were not caught locally). We also firmed up our plans for leaving the boat. We will travel down the Tennessee River and leave the boat near the ill-fated lock with the oil spill at a very nice marina. Friends (Jack and Jeannie) will visit for a couple days and bring us back to Cincy. Then we will pick up our journey to Demopolis in mid-October.

We traveled about 54 miles today and went through two locks (Smithland and Barkley). The heat was so oppressive. I don't remember ever being this hot!

Tomorrow morning we will take the short canal over to the Tennessee River. See you then!