Grand Harbor Marina to Bay Springs Marina

Today, after a morning of chores (and some work stuff for Rob) we headed out to venture down the Tennessee Tombigbee waterway. For those that are interested in just what this waterway is, we suggest you do some exploring here: TennTom Waterway . The really short version is that this is a waterway that connects where we are to Mobile, AL, and it very roughly parallels the Mississippi river. There is a considerable amount of commercial traffic (tows and barges) and 12 locks to traverse between here and Mobile. But it is much more friendly to travel than the mighty Mississippi for pleasure boats like us. We will be traveling through some very rural and remote parts of the south...but we will have plenty of company as we expect that somewhere in the range of 50 boats like ours will be on this waterway at the same time in different locations. One interesting fact about the TennTom is that more dirt was moved to construct it than was moved to construct the Panama Canal.

Today, we got through some of the more boring cruising that we will have...a 24 mile man-made cut that is the first portion of this waterway. It isn't entirely straight, but for much of the day, our chart plotter looked an awful lot like this:

View out the front window....



And the view off the stern.

Just a tad more color is starting to show in the trees. We are guessing that we left the best color behind us when we started heading south, but we'll see...

 

This is one of the few (only?) cruising boats that we have passed. At our speed, we either get passed, or travel along about the same speed as other cruisers. This is a young couple who we met in Florence a few days ago. They started in Troy, NY and are having the adventure of their lives! We saw them briefly on the dock this morning, but didn't realize that we would be passing them. More than likely we'll be playing leap frog with them along the way for awhile.

And now tonight we are tucked away at Bay Springs Marina in New Site, MS. It is a medium-sized marina, but we can tell that we are out in the sticks. We feel fortunate to have enough cell phone coverage to be able to get internet access. But the only TV stations we have tonight are some PBS channels...not very exciting!

We stumbled onto a pair of Nordic Tug 37's here at Bay Springs who are travelling the loop together, and we plan to depart with them in the morning. They are like older siblings to our American Tug, as the folks who started American Tug were formerly principals at Nordic Tug. These boats are very similar...these particular Nordic's are very sharp looking, and about 10 years newer than ours!