Saturday, October 17, 2009

Our hard drive crashed on October 29^th. Because we hadn’t been anywhere long enough for our automatic online backup to kick in, we lost ten days worth of photos. Some of those were really great pics, too! We are going to have to reach back into our memories to try to reconstruct those days on the blog, but we’ll do the best we can. There won’t be any photos until October 27^th.

We left our anchorage in the bend of the river at 9 am and continued up the Tennessee River fighting the increasing current and sometimes battling against a north wind due to the winding route. The day was a cloudy one but still quite pleasant. We arrived at Pickwick Lock and Dam around 2 pm and cleared the lock at 2:40 pm after being lowered another 55 feet to the level of Pickwick Lake. Upon entering the lake, we found the Pickwick Landing State Park fuel dock and stopped for diesel and water. We ran into the couple we’d met at Lighthouse Landing Marina on Kentucky Lake aboard e²-motion. They had experienced some mechanical problems and were getting ready to leave again tomorrow. They were anchored just outside Pickwick Landing Marina and invited us to anchor alongside tonight and travel with them for awhile. We had already decided we wanted to get further out into the lake tonight so we declined their offer and went in search of another anchorage.

At exactly 5 pm, we found ourselves at the spot in Pickwick Lake where the states of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi meet. A few minutes later we were anchoring at mile 449.0 of the Tenn-Tom Waterway on Yellow Creek. We were in a little cove where Gale and Lucy took the dinghy a short ways over to a small finger of land where Lucy could run. He met a couple there with their kids who told him about a nice anchorage back about five miles on Pickwick Lake where you could beach the boat near a 65-foot waterfall. They also told him that we should try the restaurant at Aqua Yacht Harbor Marina and order the best pancakes in three states!