Well as it turned out we stayed another day longer than planned on the last post as the winds were pretty bad so travel would have been just nuts on the river on Saturday the 7th. But really the biggest reason was there was a British Car Show in the park at the marina on Saturday, so of course we had to stay and talk some British car. We even discovered that Mark from Meant to Be and Gary from Kokomo also had British cars in their earlier days too.
The entire trip from Joe Wheeler State Park to Florence Harbor Marina is 21 miles, an easy trip, about 3 hours. We headed out on Sunday morning around 9 AM…well, we planned to do that. Michael called the Wheeler lock, a short 3 miles away from the marina, to get their status. As it would be, there was a barge packet expected to arrive to the lock shortly, so we had to sit tight for at least an hour. Michael fired up our AIS (Automatic Identification System) and was able to locate the barge and follow it through the lock. He called back in the instructed hour and found that we were clear to start heading that way. They just had to “turn the lock around” which usually takes about 20 minutes. So we saddled up and headed out. Now, here’s the thing with these locks, just because they say “come on this way”, it doesn’t really mean much as we headed there at slow idle speed which took us about 30 minutes or so to get there only to have to wait another half hour or so before we could get in. The question that everyone always has is, “what are they doing in there, and why is it taking so long?” No one ever wants to ask them those questions as the last thing you want to do is anger the guys who run the locks. You might find all your subsequent trips are mysteriously delayed. Yup, they have all the power.
The next lock, the Wilson Lock, was about 14 miles away and we had to get through that before we could get to Florence Harbor Marina, the endpoint for the trip. Sometimes you can get right through this lock, but it does have the reputation of being a nightmare with veeerrryyy long wait times. The reason is that the seawall that barge packets stage on and run along to enter the lock was damaged by a storm a few years ago causing the entire wall to sink, therefore there is nothing to safely guide barge packets into the lock. So now they have to break apart the large packets, some being up to 16 individual barges, into individual barges and a helper tug is necessary to assist in the process. And that takes time, unfortunately a lot of time.
We knew we were behind the packet Callie Duvall, that went through Wheeler lock before us, but we also knew it was only a 2 barge packet, so that should have been through and out of our way before we got to Wheeler. But, nope! We heard on the radio that the Captain of Callie Duvall was pushing the head barge up into the trees along the river and not going through the lock. What? Why? Is that as far as they were going…nope.
Michael called the Wilson Lock and was told that we were looking at getting through between 5-6 that night! That was 6 hours away at the earliest. There was already a large barge packet that was working to get it’s multiple barges through and still had several more to move. Then the Callie Duvall would go through and then hopefully us.
There was a lot of, let’s just say, boisterous discussion and texting, really only among the women, about the situation. The guys just shrug and say “nothing we can do”. Anyways, we decided to find a place to pull off the river and drop anchor for a few hours. Now, the big problem with the Wheeler Lake part of the Tennessee River is that it has deep granite river banks, like 70-100 feet deep and with the winds and waves throwing the boats around simply pulling over was not an option. So we all split up and headed to the several little fingers around the lake to look for a decent spot to drop anchor. Well, none were found as those areas were full of houses with their own docks crowding the inlet and they too were very deep. By this time almost 2 hours had gone by and Gary on Kokomo decided he was just going to sit in the middle of the lake and shut down his engines and float for a while. Eventually Mark on Meant to Be did the same. We did manage to find a small spot that was without houses and shallow enough with enough swing room so we wouldn’t hit shore, so we dropped anchor and sat…and sat…and sat.
Many hours later we heard the lockmaster call the Callie Duvall and tell them to prepare to move into position. Michael called the lock again. This time he was told that there were 2 more barges downriver waiting for up bound travel and there was a cruise ship wanting to do the same. AND it was close to shift change, so that was going to take time as well. Jeesh, will this day never end!
Here’s the thing, we, as pleasure boaters, are the lowest on the food chain and all commercial traffic has priority ahead of those just out mucking around the lakes and rivers on their boats. But, we did check in with the lockmaster before the 3 up bound vessels requested passage and I did hear the lockmaster tell the first barge down river that he did have 3 pleasure boats he was going to be sending down before he locked them up. Now we could only hope he stayed with that plan. And he did. We got in the lock at 6 PM, at shift change which caused another delay, 8 hours after we started this journey.
The Wilson lock is a single chamber lock 110 feet wide and 600 feet long. On average 10 million tons of wheat, corn, scrap metal, and chemicals, are transported through the lock yearly. There too are more than 1,000 lockages for recreational traffic a year as well. It is the highest single lift lock east of the Rocky Mountains, lifting between 93-100 feet with Ice Harbor Lock on the Lower Snake River in Washington being the highest at 103 feet. This dam was also the US first hydroelectric project in the country.
We finally, after almost 10 hours and only 21 miles since we left that morning, we got into Florence Harbor Marina. Everyone got safely tucked away and we all gathered on Kokomo for docktails. That was quite a day and I never want to go through Wilson Lock again. There are still several more locks in our future before we get down to Mobile, Alabama and into the Gulf of Mexico, but I am hoping none like Wilson Lock.
The next morning we said goodbye to Kokomo as they headed further down the river, but we will likely be seeing them again in a few days or weeks as they are headed back down to Mississippi, their home port.
We, along with Meant to Be, are staying here for the week as there is a pretty significant storm, maybe turning into a hurricane, heading up from Mexico north to Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama that will be causing problems even as far up in Alabama as we are. So rather than chance being out on anchor we decided to stay put with electric, water and even a loaner car. We will see what happens next.
Well, that’s all for THIS is what’s adventures for now. Check back later. Love to all, Gina and Mike
