Once again we are off to an early start to Midway Marina, which derives its name appropriately enough from being about in the middle of the Tenn-Tom Waterway. Our trip today is 86.4 miles or about 10 hours plus we have 5 locks to transit, which will add some unknown amount of time. The first picture is once again a sunrise, which this time is looking back east over the Pirates Cove Marina. Sunrise this morning was at about 6:10 am just for reference.The first lock is the John Stennis Lock, and it is only 4.2 miles from the marina. The routine is to call the lock before starting the engines at the dock in the event of a delay. Fortunately, we were told that they would have the gates open and to call when we were secured to the lock wall.
The sky started cloudless, but scattered clouds built up over the day. All in all it was a great start to the day. As we get closer to the headwaters of the Tombigbee River, the waterway spend very little time in the actual river channel and most of its time in a much straighter, man made channel near the actual river channel. The scenery was more of the same tree lined channel with little in the way of signs of civilization. However, Lucky did show up on the top of the flybridge console to look out one of the front windows. I suppose that most of the attraction is smells that come in with the breeze (?). Whatever the attraction, it generally only lasts a couple of minutes.
Interesting sights along the trip today included this shipping container terminal. The large crane loads/unloads containers from barges. There is a railroad track under the crane as well a several of the large front end loaders that can lift and stack individual containers. The barges sit along the dock under the overhead crane that lifts the containers. There were several factories in the area so it may be that they are actually shipping out finished goods (?) probably down river to the major container terminal in Mobile.
We also passed two different fuel terminals. They are most likely for gasoline and diesel fuel rather than heating oil. Heating around here seems to be natural gas or propane in general. The barges for the hydrocarbons that we have passed have mainly been tows of one or two barges rather bigger ones that are possible on this waterway. Perhaps they are regulated as to size?
I mentioned the relatively small size of the flammable or red flagged tows carrying hydrocarbons above. This photo shows the Terah Huckabee with what seems is one of the largest tows that we have passed. The locks all have chambers that are listed as 600 feet long and 110 feet wide, This means that the lock chamber is three barges long and three wide, but that figure does not include a towboat at the rear, which would add roughly 100 feet to the overall length. To have 9 barges the tow would have to be broken down into smaller groups of barges at every lock, and then the towboat would have to make two trips through the lock before re-assembling the whole tow to proceed to the next lock. To get around this problem there are only 2 barges in the middle with the towboat tucked in where the third barge would be. This arrangement is able to fit inside a lock as a single package, which solves the problem.
All of the locks today had graciously worked together and were ready for our arrival although we continued to follow proper procedure and call ahead, etc. This was very professional on their part, and it contributed to a speedy transit each time. All of the five locks had a lift of about 27 feet today, and the time from when the gate closed behind us until the gate opened for us to exit was about 20 minutes. The photo on the right was taken from the flybridge of Lucky Us and shows the Fulton Dam, which is the last of the 5 locks for today. We are in the lock chamber in the full up position about to exit the lock, and this dam has 5 flood gates that are capable of releasing a lot of water unlike the dams that we first encountered down stream. So, this dam can control the level of its reservoir to store or release water.
The last photo was taken as we exited the Fulton Lock. So far, all of the locks that we have passed through on the Tenn-Tom have one or two barges loaded with parts of a fixed lock gate either tied to the outside of the upstream entrance or moored close by. Some even have permanently mounted cranes to lift these segments into position. They fit into a slot on either side just outside the upstream entrance to the lock. When in place, they would allow the lock to be drained to work on or replace the lock gates. All part of ongoing maintenance (or in event of an emergency repair.
After exiting the Fulton Lock, we were only 2.7 miles from our destination at Midway Marina. We finished the day about 6:00pm "only" 12 hours after we had started... Lucky and I had several nice walks around the very large, cut grass fields and roads within the marina with dinner and some TV in between. While we were gone on the long second walk, the Admiral set off to try out the hot tub, but it was just her (bad) luck to find that it had just developed an electrical problem. That is very disappointing after a hard day...
Well, guess what? We are planning another early start in the morning. However, this early start is designed to get us to our destination at Grand Harbor Marina about 2:30pm and hopefully beat the predicted late afternoon thunderstorms. Here's hoping...
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