Day 70
Apparently our stern anchor did not hold, because when Steve looked outside the next morning, he saw that Legacy had turned 90-degrees from where she was the night before, and was now floating crosswise in the channel! We really lucked-out that we didn’t run aground, thankfully. With Lucky Lucky a few minutes ahead of us, we raised the anchors, started up the engines and got the heck out of that anchorage before we DID run aground.
Farther down the river we passed the mouths of the Alabama and the Tennessaw Rivers, where they joined the Black Warrior/Tombigbee Waterway. The closer we got to the Mobile River, Mobile Harbor, and eventually Mobile Bay, the more industry popped into view.
We couldn’t have asked for better weather coming into Mobile Bay. I ran all around Legacy’s deck, clicking picture after picture of all the sights along the Mobile River and entering Mobile Harbor, while Steve maneuvered through the increasingly crowded waterway that was rapidly filling up with working tow-boats. We cruised Legacy right over the I-10 Mobile Bay tunnel that we’d driven through annually to and from Navarre Beach for decades.
Steve had called ahead to Dog River Marina, advising them we would need service and a transient slip for several nights. The woman he spoke to told him she’d send word to the fuel dock to hold a slip for us and would ask the service department to call him back for details. We never heard back from the service department, but blamed that on the spotty Verizon cell coverage coming down the Tombigbee. We had to travel down the starboard side of Mobile Bay to the entrance into Dog River. When we pulled up to the fuel docks, no one was outside to catch our lines when we arrived, and there were only pilings for me to tie the lines around, rather than dock cleats for me to lasso with the loop-end of the bow and stern lines. Steve brought Legacy right up against the dock, before a very slow-moving man finally approached us from the office. He was far from the friendliest harbor master, who – when I handed him the bow line and asked him how he was – grunted “I’m here.” He then proceeded to move so slowly that Steve and I ended up performing our own pump-out and pumping our own fuel. When Steve asked him for the location of our transient slip, he informed us that “no one had told him about our reservation” and that the only slip he had left had no power on it. Having never heard back from Dog River’s service department, Steve promptly called Turner Marina next door to Dog River to see if they had a transient slip available with power and if their service department could possibly repair our port stabilizer while we were there. We had read some less than stellar reviews posted on Facebook about Dog River Marina, but found out in person that they are not all that interested in attracting new clients or even providing marginal customer service. Our experience prompted Steve to post his own review on The Great Loop FB page, which quickly received concurring comments. It’s really a shame that Dog River Marina has gone so far down hill, especially since they are longtime AGLCA sponsors. Turner provided us with a place, which Steve expertly reversed into. We got our first experience tying up to fixed docks at Turner, which meant even though I’d hung our fenders out on the port side of the boat, their height had been previously adjusted for the floating docks we’d encountered along the river systems, so they dangled uselessly (and ridiculously) far beneath the fixed docks that are common on the bay. Once the engines were off, Steve jumped onto the dock and readjusted the fender heights so that they weren’t so worthless at this tie-up, then he wrapped our lines securely around the pilings.
That night we walked over to the nearby Mobile Yacht Club for dinner, then came back to the boat early. This had been one long and busy day. But we had accomplished another milestone – we’d made it to Mobile Bay!
Position tonight: N 30° 33.973, W 88° 05.358
Distance traveled: 69.8 NM
Total distance traveled: 1407.9 NM