Good Morning Tombigbee

October 16

Good morning all!
Yesterday we left the lovely Tennesse River by turning to starboard on Yellow Creek. This waterway is part of the Corps of Engineers project, the Tombigbee Waterway. The largest C of E project in our country’s history linking the midwest to the Gulf jof Mexico at Mobile, Alabama, allowing commerce (and us) to bypass the Mississippi River.
The first part of our journey yesterday was on glass like water. As beautiful as this river is, at flood stage it can be devastating. The following images highlight what a body of water can do to a shoreline when it rises.
The debris on this hillside? Yep, that was a home once upon a time not so long ago. A similar fate awaits the house in the top left of the photo.
A closer look. Surely this home has already been condemned.
This kind of erosion went on for miles. In many cases homeowners used rip rap to stabilize the shoreline. A temporary fix to be sure because wherever the rip rap ends the water will simply undermine the shore at either end.
Ya think this guy sleeps at night?
Another one bites the dust (or soon will)
We saw lots of examples of these time bombs.

If anybody reading this blog has ties to the insurance business, Debbie and I would like to know how/even IF insurance can bought for a home in a location like this. Please message through this blog. I wonder if these homes are insured.
These homes appear (operative term being “appear”) to be protected, but a river is very patient.
Due to the shape of the hull of Whisky Business she throws quite a wake. If we passed these fellows at our cruising speed of 9 mph, they might shoot at us. ALWAYS slow to idle speed when we approach fishermen. Just good Karma.
Since we got on the Tennessee River we have been traveling upstream, against the current. We are burning fuel as if we were going 9+mph. As we got close to the Pickwick Lock and Dam the current increased to close to 3mph. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but a lot of trawler type boats only have a TOP speed of only 10 mph which means they cruise around 6 or 7mph. If WB had to travel upstream at only 4mph Debbie would kill me!
This bouy is barely hanging on!
Our approach to Pickwick L & D.
A 30 second time lapse video of our ride up the lock and our our trip to the Pickwick state park fuel dock. While there we picked our Looper buddies we met last year. They boarded WB for the short ride to Aqua Yacht Marina.
Haven’t seen this before. In lieu of stairs going down to your dock, the more affluent install a trolley system!
The gang is all here! Milton and Julie Schaefer will join us for a few days while the Garbers (Carey & Keri, hysterical, right!) headed back to Michigan this morning.

2 thoughts on “Good Morning Tombigbee”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: