Day 22

Today was quite the eventful day. We spent 90% of our time battling the river going upstream. (We are on the Ohio River now and we have to travel it upstream to the Tennessee) There were several logs in the river and lots of other debris. We hit a log several times and had to stop the boat to make sure that there was no damage to the rudder or engines. At one time we thought that the transmission was going because it started to make a whining noise, however all was well after Grant slowed the boat and then started again. The weather today was sunny with some cold wind. Grant spent most of the day driving from the top. We didn’t make as good of time as we would have liked, but that was due to the river being high at this time and the current going against us. In fact, the river was so high both lock and dams that we needed to go through were completely under water! We called the lockmaster on the radio and he told us to just be cautious and stay in the channel and go directly over the dam. We could see parts of the lock (antenna and cement pillars) sticking out of the water, but that was it. The depth gauge consistently read 20 feet! Wow, the river is high and moving fast…

After we finally made it through the Ohio we had a decision to make: Take the Tennessee River or follow the Ohio for an additional 12 miles to the Cumberland River which would eventually run into the Tennessee. They say the Cumberland is quicker, but the Tennessee is a shorter distance. We surveyed the fuel situation and decided to play it safe and take the Tennessee… Paducah, Illinois is at the junction of the Tennessee and Ohio rivers. I think that Tabbie is going to make her resting place here for a while. She has been talking about working on the barges and we passed the training center for the INGRAM barge company. (See picture) She would really like to take a tour of the inside of one, but Grant is afraid that they might kidnap her to be their chef and then he would be eating beans out of a can the rest of the way!

We had a beautiful evening drive along the Tennessee and enjoyed yet another gorgeous sunset. Along the Tennessee we saw a brand new barge container that was about to be slid down into the water. It is amazing how big those things really are. Kind of like an iceberg. I think that we really only see about 1/5 of them when they are in the water... Grant also saw several tows pushing upwards of 25+ barges at the same time (while Tabbie was sleeping!). We never saw that on the Mississippi, and are guessing it is because the locks are not wide enough to support 5 or 6 containers at a time. It becomes quite intimidating when trying to pass…

We arrived at the Kentucky dam at about dusk, and called ahead to see what the timing looked like. This was where everyone says you can lose a lot of time; because it tends to be quite the bottleneck along the river as it takes 20 minutes just to pump the water out of the lock. It was a 56-foot lift for us (as compared to the Mississippi locks which averaged between 10 and 12 feet). We were extremely lucky, and there was no other traffic in the area, so we were able to get through right away. Take a look at the picture – this thing is massive!! It was a good thing we choose to use the Tennessee River and got through the dam quickly because the port engine fuel tank was running on Empty for about 15 miles… We thought for sure the tank would run out of gas, thanks to Tabbie thinking it was necessary to run the generator the past two nights!

We pulled into the marina about 7:30 and were in dire need of a shower, so much so that we did that before we ate even though we were also starving. We hadn’t had a hot shower in a week! Grant was really beginning to stink, but Tabbie was of course smelling like roses, as always! That was a long 12 hours of driving today…