Day 181-183- October 14, 15 & 16

Clifton, TN to Iuka, MS, a pleasant roll up the river.  We were bucking about 1.5MPH current, but made good progress.

The architecture was certainly varied!

The houses on stilts are still commonplace here...
unless they are on a hill like these below.

The sexy new Garmin Plotter has a feature called "Auto Guidance", which I have been using extensively.  Find where you want to go, touch the screen and select Auto Guidance and it plots the course.  Then select "Engage Follow Route" on the autopilot and off you go.

But...

You have to watch it like a hawk!  Three times on today's route it did weird stuff like this - take you off the course, sometimes on to dry land.  Trust, but verify!

Pickwick Lock. 
It brings you up 54 feet.  This is as high as we will get on this leg of the journey. 
It's all downhill from here to Mobile, Alabama.

A 53' lock has really tall walls and gates.

In case you forgot what a lock looks like...

The floating bollard makes it easy to keep the boat in one place while the water raises or drops.

The large tow was waiting for the lock when we exited.

This shot above is a glimpse of the National Cemetery at the Shiloh Battlefield.

This mundane little stretch of shore is actually Pittsburg Landing.  Union General U.S. Grant brought the Union army ashore here for what became the battle of Shiloh.  His actual objective was Corinth, MS, about 10 miles South, but the Confederates attacked before he could concentrate his forces, dealing a severe blow to the Union and forcing them to fall back and almost lose Pittsburg Landing.

Overnight, in a violent thunderstorm, 30,000 Union troops came ashore here via steamboats from Savannah, 12 mile North.  They reclaimed lost ground, the Confederate forces withdrew and the objective was achieved, but at severe loss of life on both sides.

Pretty cool way to be outside without the bugs.

These folks had to build their house around the rock strata.


The river must not flood as high here at Iuka, Mississippi.
These boathouses are floating and go up and down with the water level.

The blue dot is us, in the boat, on the river at the intersection of
Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee.



DAY 182 & 183
October 15 & 16
Spent three night at Aqua Yacht Marina in Iuka. That meant we also got to do the exciting stuff like buy groceries, do laundry, clean, etc.

Sometimes you only see the spider webs when the sunlight hits them just right!

An epic early morning voyage this morning. 

All the way to the fuel dock to pump out the poo tank. 
Chilly air, warmer water condenses the water vapor creating what we call 'sea smoke'.

Check out this video to see how the "sea smoke" moves.

Grady, working on the blog...
Gee, thanks a lot Paul, now you revealed my secret.
I had everyone convinced that I did the blog.

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