Day 2
After a peaceful night at Cane Creek, we awoke to a gorgeous sunrise to rival the stunning sunset from the night before.
With a long travel day ahead, we got around, showered and ate breakfast early. Steve readied the boat to pull anchor. It was another spectacular weather day, with cool morning temps and just a slight breeze. I stood at the bow-sprit with the hose ready to wash-down the anchor as Steve raised it from up in the flybridge. We were wearing our “marriage saver” headsets to communicate with each other in normal, loving vocal tones, rather than impatient, aggravating shouts. (What a concept!) As the anchor chain drew in, I leaned over to see whether or not the anchor would be covered in mud. As it emerged, I was at a loss as to what I was seeing! “Oh, my God!” was what I uttered into the headset microphone. Since Steve couldn’t see what I was seeing, he immediately assumed (as always) that my startled exclamation was just another one of my dramatic, female exagerations. Once I was able to figure out what was dangling before me, I realized our anchor had snagged and pulled up an entire TREE TRUNK from the creek’s bottom. Steve finally decided to take me seriously and came down from the flybridge to see what we’d “caught”.
Needless to say, Steve ceased his scoffing and went to grab the boat hook. He assumed the wood was so old and rotted that he could break off the tip which had snagged the anchor chain and just “push” the tree trunk off the anchor and back into the depths from which it had come. Sadly, his assumption turned out like most assumptions do, and the wood was not at all brittle, so had no intention of breaking off, no matter how much force Steve placed on it with the boat hook. He tried for several minutes before he had me go up into the flybridge and lower the monstrosity back down to the water’s surface, in hopes of reducing the effects of gravity on the trunk. In addition, I watched the chart plotter, to make sure Legacy wasn’t drifting into shallow depths (as we were no longer anchored). After another several minutes of struggling without even budging the tree, Steve announced we would need to lower our dinghy into the water, so he could get to the problem from water-level and close up. I dropped the combo anchor/tree trunk back to the bottom so Legacy would again be anchored to the bottom of the creek while we lowered the dinghy. Deploying the dinghy isn’t the quick and easy feat one might expect. It involves first removing the large, cumbersome dinghy cover, unstrapping the dinghy from its mounts on Legacy’s deck, then the two-person job of accessing and operating a series of hooks, clamps, crane-control mechanism and cabling, and a pully-system, just to ready the dinghy for lowering. Once we completed all necessary steps, we were both dripping with sweat and thinking we should’ve waited to shower. We raised the dinghy off its mounts into the air and spun it slowly around (we estimate it actually weighs 1200 lbs) as we craned it out over the boat railing and hovered it above the water. Steve slowly lowered it into the water next to Legacy’s starboard side, donned his life jacket and climbed aboard “Digney” as I kept it from floating away from the boat. After releasing all necessary cabling and lines, Steve started the dinghy motor and maneuvered up to Legacy’s bow, while I raised the anchor/tree from the creek bottom to dinghy-level at the water’s surface. Steve readied himself to grab hold of the anchor. As it surfaced, however, Steve exclaimed that there was no longer a tree trunk hanging on our anchor! Apparently, when I’d dropped it onto the bottom, that was all we needed to do to dislodge the trunk. D’OH! As Steve motored the dinghy back to the back of the boat, and we reversed the tedious steps to raise and remount the dinghy back onto its above-deck mounts, we learned another valuable lesson the hard way: BEFORE deploying the dinghy, always first try dropping the anchor back onto the bottom once or twice, to dislodge the offending object! UGH!
Disaster averted, we headed the boat on up the Tennessee River toward our next planned anchorage, which was called Double Island.
Because we had such a long day, we called Mermaid Marina, near Decaturville, TN, to see if they had a transient slip available for us to rent for the night. They said they did, and told Steve they believed their current shallowest depths could handle Legacy’s 5-foot draft. I readied the lines and hung out the fenders as Steve approached the marina’s entrance. Unfortunately, about a third of the way into the marina’s entrance, Steve felt our boat nudge the bottom, and our depth meter suddenly read only 2/10ths of a foot below our keel! He instantly placed Legacy in reverse, and we saw clouds of muddy water come billowing out from underneath the bow. Probably due to winter pool, that channel was too shallow for our comfort. We decided to continue on to another anchorage called Kelly’s Island. But once we got there, we saw that winter pool had definitely dropped its water level way below the normal pool depth listing of 20-feet. So we cruised on to Plan C, which was our original destination of Double Island. We got lucky at this anchorage and found a depth of 12 feet, with which we were comfortable. We dropped anchor and settled in for a peaceful night.
Position tonight: N35° 27.755, W88° 01.928
Distance traveled: 59.2NM
Total distance traveled: 108.20
Time underway: 7 HRS 28 MIN
Total time underway: 13 HRS 6 MIN
Total marina nights: 0
Total nights at anchor: 2
Locks today: 0
Locks Total: 0