Day 20 to Bobby's Fish Camp

     The anchorage last night was perfect.  We ran the generator for the afternoon/evening for the AC and cooking for dinner, but then we turned it off at bedtime for a quite night after it had cooled down outside.  One of the big breakthroughs of last night was that Lucky used the artificial turf to do her business!  Yeah!!!! This also means that we are not going to take her to shore this morning so one of our first tasks is to load Terry's kayak back in its mount on the flybridge rail. It weighs about 60 pounds, but we lean over the edge of the wings (or extensions) along the side of the flybridge and lift her up with bow and stern lines. Then we pulled up the anchor at 6:27 am (picture at right) and are now headed to Bobby's Fish Camp which is 68.6 miles and one lock upriver.  

     There is fog over the water so we are watching the chart plotter carefully for the AIS symbols of barges, while watching the river for logs. We can see both sides of the river so we opted to keep the radar off for now since with the trees so close along our sides the radar basically only see ahead to the next bend in the river.  The Coffeeville Lock is shortly before the marina and therefore at the end of the day.  We will be going up river against the flow plus there is still a (very) mild tide. So as we departed the anchorage, there is some unknown factor about just how fast we will actually be travelling. It took several hours for the fog to completely burn off, but there has been almost no traffic on the river.

     We have been watching on the web as some flood waters moved down the Tombigbee River from Demopolis, Alabama about 150 miles up river. The flood waters are now in the area that we stayed in last night and up river for much (all?) of today's route. The picture at the right shows some recent erosion on the bank of the river. The recent flood waters were at least this high, and we are travelling up river about 100 feet from shore. The water depths here have consistently registered 20+/- feet. This would include about 8 feet of flood water above normal river level according to the US Corps of Engineers data. Without the flood water, we would be at the edge of the navigable (for barges) channel, and there would be an additional 30+ feet of river bank (just guessing) in the photo.

     We arrived at the Coffeeville Lock and Dam about 4:00pm and were locked right through with essentially no wait. The lift here is normally 34 feet, but it "seemed" less than that amount, which if true would be due to flood water down stream. The Lockmaster was most accommodating, which really helps since there is still a lot of water coming over the dam (at right in photo). The high current below the dam makes "hanging out" waiting for the lock much more difficult.

      Then after just over 2 miles past the lock we arrived at Bobby's Fish Camp for a 2 night stay. Since I am supposed to be "rigorously honest", I will say that I did a very poor job of docking. We are docked on a floating dock parallel to the river, and docking should have been very simple. I brought the boat into the dock with the bow into the current, but for some unknown reason, I brought the stern to the dock first. The Admiral looped a line over a cleat, and then she went forward to do the same at the bow. However, the bow, which had been about 2 feet from the dock, got caught by the current and I could not stop it from swinging around away from the dock... In the process I managed to rip out the cleat on the dock that we had been tied to. The next approach to the dock was bow first into the current, and once the bow line was secured the stern drifted in the current right over to the dock. I knew better the first time, but I guess that it was just one of those "brain farts"...

     There was one other Looper boat that came in after us, here they are moored behind Lucky Us on the main dock (photo at right). I did not tell them why there was no cleat where they wanted to tie their bow line...

     Tomorrow is a rest day at Bobby's Fish Camp. We have been pushing fairly hard since leaving Gulfport, MS in order to cross Mississippi Sound and Mobile Bay in relatively low winds, and we have accomplished this so we will take a rest day tomorrow. It is not a very luxurious place but rather a basic fishing camp. However, the restaurant gets rave reviews from Loopers for its fried, freshly caught catfish. So, after taking Lucky for a fairly long walk, we are heading to the restaurant.

   Guess what? It's going to be another night where bedtime comes early...