Day 69
Thursday morning, 11/19/20, dawned foggy. We had planned with Lucky Lucky, the night before, to leave at first light (6 AM) to proceed together for the Coffeeville lock, but fog kept us right where we were for another hour or so. The Coffeeville Lock was the last lock on the TennTombigbee/Black Warrior Tombigbee waterways, which was just fine with Gilligan! (Steve edit: the Coffeeville lock is the last lock we will traverse until late spring, early summer, when we head up the Hudson River in New York). This was another long travel day, following Lucky Lucky again to the next anchorage, which was Three Rivers.
That evening, when we reached the entrance to the Three Rivers anchorage, Legacy somehow ended up in front of Lucky Lucky, so that we were the “guinea pig boat”, going in first to check out water depths to make sure both of our boats could get in without running aground. We slowly followed the narrow and winding, tree-shrouded entrance and found plenty of depth (7-feet or so), until we reached the point where the anchorage opened back up and fanned-out widely. But just as we reached that point, the water depth suddenly and sharply rose to between 2 and 1 feet beneath our keel! Steve put Legacy into reverse and we came back into the channel a ways to regain depth where we dropped anchor. Because he knew the Three Rivers anchorage would be narrower than our previous anchorages, Steve had already assembled our stern anchor, which (together with the bow anchor) helped the boat to remain floating in one linear direction once he dropped it into the water from the stern, rather than allowing the boat to swing around in a circle overnight, if pushed by wind or current. Assured that they had enough depth, Lucky Lucky anchored about 50 yards back from us in the same narrow channel. We settled in for the night, ate dinner, and were watching another episode of Fortitude on Amazon Prime, when Steve noticed the depth under our keel (which he monitored by watching the depth gauge over the salon helm) was noticeably lessening. Three Rivers anchorage was the first place we encountered the affects of tidal waters, since we were now floating between the last Tombigbee lock and the ocean! The tide was supposed to be coming up about a foot through the evening, which should’ve increased the amount of depth between us and the bottom, rather than reduce it. This didn’t sit well with Steve, so he decided to pull the stern anchor, move the boat slightly, and then re-drop the stern anchor in deeper water. We put on our headsets and I went up to the flybridge helm to run the engines per Steve’s direction to get the boat where he wanted it to be. The only downside to this plan was that it was after 8:30 pm and pitch-dark outside! D’OH! While Steve worked from the stern of the boat, we turned on the spotlight at the front of the boat for my visibility, but it had fogged-up outside, which meant the spotlight was of no use to see the bank across the river to help keep the boat straight. Being in the back, away from the bright light, Steve was able to see the bank, so while he moved the stern anchor he had to tell me which direction to move the bow and stern-thrusters to keep us off of the bank. I watched the depth gauge as we inched along, and called out the depth over the headset to Steve. Finally, after what seemed like several tense and dark hours, we had gained about 5 feet of depth and now showed 6-feet on the gauge, rather than the earlier 1-foot. Steve felt more comfortable with this new depth, so he re-dropped the stern anchor, I shut off the engines, and we went back inside for the night.
Position: N 31° 17.332, W 87° 58.060
Distance traveled: 54.7 NM
Total distance traveled: 1338.1 NM
Total marina nights: 54
Total nights at anchor: 15
Locks today: 1
Locks Total: 27