Kentucky to Huntsville, Alabama

Our last few days on the Cumberland River were lazy, summer days with few spectacular sights, but lots of nice scenery. This “mansion” is sometimes referred to as the “Castle on the Cumberland”; but we definitely don’t recommend staying there. They only take long-term visitors, the meals consist of bread and water, and they have “super-hot chairs”. In reality, they are famous for setting the United States record for the most legal executions in one day. On Friday, July 13, 1928, seven men were executed. This seems rather gruesome, so we’ll save all of our Civil War pictures and war info until after we visit Shiloh National Monument, that way the rest of this message can be more upbeat.

Coming from Rhode Island, we are accustomed to state parks in small scale, little acreage, no cabins, but beautiful scenery and good hiking or biking trails. We were not prepared for the large state parks that we have seen and that seem to be common in Tennessee and Alabama. Our first experience in a state park was at Lake Barkley. We spent three nights in the marina there and enjoyed biking on bumpy wooded trails, marveling at the twenty-five deer grazing by the roadside as we biked by, and dining in a cathedral-style wooden lodge overlooking Barkley Lake,. We even took a long dinghy ride up the small side creek and had a picnic lunch on the banks of one of the park islands. We have seen many other similar large state parks along the river.


When we were in Maine we thought it was difficult maneuvering the boat through lobster pot floats and here leaving Lake Barkley State Park in Tennessee it is equally difficult to maneuver by the fish pot floats.







Our first stop in Kentucky was at Green Turtle Bay Marina where we met long-time friends, Mike and Valli, from Canada who are also taking their boat on the Great Loop trip through the eastern waterways of the United States and Canada. There were several other “Loopers”, as we are called, at the marina. We have crossed paths with many of them since. Most are enjoying the rivers of Tennessee and Alabama before heading south for the winter. We explored Paducah, Kentucky by car, visiting a spectacular quilting museum, which had a wooden quilt that looked exactly like fabric. I even had to touch it to convince myself that it really was wood. Paducah has many interesting paintings depicting important events in the history of the area. The paintings are on concrete flood protection walls lining the waterfront park. Quite nice!

















Kentucky Lake is a large lake formed by the last dam on the Tennessee River. The Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area is formed between Kentucky Lake (Tennessee River) and Barkley Lake(lowest lake on the Cumberland River). We spent several nights anchored in different creeks off Kentucky Lake. We watched many fisherman and mussel gatherers and took time to read, daydream, hike and dinghy explore. Mussel gathering is done by either “brailing” or diving. Brailing is the process of dragging a metal bar with tines over the mussel beds. The boats for brailing have a super structure built up to support the metal bar. The open mussels clamp down on the tines and are later pulled to the surface. Diving to collect mussels is done with a compressor on the boat and the diver mucking around in the dark water with his hands to find and gather the mussels (yuck!!!). The boats always display a diver’s flag when someone is diving.






We passed a canoe with the banner “Paddle Across America” and thought they would have been interesting people to talk to, but never got the opportunity to visit them.











There is a saying about “the calm before the storm”, but we didn’t realize that this ideal weather and relaxing time was exactly that, “the calm before the storm”. Tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings stayed with us for three days. We anchored in a well-protected harbor for two nights and then hurried to a marina in Florence, Alabama for the third night. We avoided most of the bad weather, but had some frightening black clouds and some strong winds for a little while. We still are intimidated by tornado warnings, and are thankful that nothing more than warnings developed.



After good weather returned we headed up the Tennessee River to the Wilson Lock. It was the world’s highest single lift lock when it was built in the 1950’s. Today it is the sixth highest in the U. S. Unfortunately we couldn’t use this lock because a barge had hit its upper gate earlier this year and it was severely damaged. During the repair period the older and original set of two locks is being used. The older locks are much smaller and cannot carry a tow and its barges in one pass. The morning we wanted to go through there were five tows with barges waiting to make the pass. Each tow could have only one of its barges lock through at a time and then the barges were reconnected at the other side of the two locks. The whole process takes about seventy-five minutes per barge and the lockmasters will lock pleasure boats after one whole tow-and-barge load has been completed. Three pleasure boats were waiting to lock through. After being told we had to get in line to be scheduled for a locking, one of the three pleasure boats moved to the lock area to reserve a “pleasure boat locking” for all three. After they had waited an hour, the third boat and we moved up to the locking area. Now there were three pleasure boats moving about as we tried to keep out of the way and two towboats moving around trying to build up the barge load in an area that was much too small! After two more hours of this, we were told to move into the lock and secure our boats. The other two boats tied together to a single moving bollard and we tied up to a different moving bollard. Somehow the simple process of locking became an “unusual event”. An air bubble was trapped in the water supply lines causing much more turbulence than normal and caused a large fountain of water to spew up in the lock, probably ten feet in diameter and at least six feet high. This caused lots of turbulence and waves in the locks. We were fine, but the two other boats had a hard time staying close to the lock wall. One of the captains had to turn his boat’s engine on and put it in reverse to keep the two boats at the wall. The lockmasters apologized later, saying it was the first time something like that had occurred. We were all a bit unnerved and we are hoping that the repairs are complete before our return through this lock in December. Unfortunately no one got a picture of the “fountain of water”, but these pictures show our boat in the turbulence and the other two boats moving from the wall.

Last night we stayed in Huntsville, Alabama. We will be taking a guided tour of the city in two weeks, so we didn’t explore the space center yet. Bill and I did go for a long bike ride last night. It felt good to get some exercise! Our excitement for the evening was nearly getting run over by three deer as they charged between us and the couple walking in front of us on the biking path. The deer jumped into the creek to the side of us and went running and splashing away. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t bike in the early evening when the sun has set and the sky is brilliantly red, but “What A Sight!”.

The yellow line represents our 2006 cruise on Harbour Reach.