Day 15 on the river (11/11/11)

This morning started 5 degrees colder than Mlps, MN, and we are in the South now. What gives with that?  We had planned to get a early jump but frost on everything and fog slowed us down. We motored out using the GPS and me standing on the bow looking for the bouys to get out of the marnia. And motored slow till the fog started to lift. A few miles down the river the GPS said we had a rail road bridge ahead, so I got back on the bow.

At one point we saw it through the fog, off  to one side in front of the boat.  So we watched closely, but could not see it, then i saw something strange off to the side again. Dave had slowed way down, and when I looked back and there was the bridge again, and wondered how we missed it, since the fog was  that heavy at this point.  I looked at the map book and turns out a huge part of the bridge had been removed. we missed the bridge becuase it was not there. The strange thing I saw was an abandoned dock just on the other side of where the RR bridge was. 

The day warmed up to the mid 60's, but even better the 30 plus mph winds were not there, so the day was better then we had thought it might be. Most of the leaves are gone here, more than even two days North of here. This area of Tennessee/Duck River would be very pretty during the summer with all the trees along the river. The river banks drop off right at bank for the most part. The channel runs bank to bank. There was one point when I estimated that the river was about 800' wide, and depth guage showed 70' deep.  Mostly we are 40' plus depth still. We are still technically going up river till day after tomorrow, even though we are headed South.

We are doing about 6.5 MPH. Looking tonight at our route to Mobile, AL, we thought we would arrive there next Friday, but now it is looking like saturday or sunday.

Today I made bread in the bread maker, so we have freash bread with dinner tonight. We had to pick a place to dock for the night, since there's no marinas around. We found a place to turn off the river at about 4:30 pm as the sun was getting low. The info we had said a minimum of 6' at low water. The bank came up quick from 30' to 15' to 7', then the alarm is going off 5' so I put the boat in reverse and gunned the engine. So now we had to find a new spot with less than 30 min of day light. With the next marina 18 miles away, Dave found on the map what looked like a good spot, but 20 min out. About 1.5 miles later, we came upon a small creek, and pulled in, only finding the bottom once before finding a good spot, and set both anchors for the night.