July 6th we head for the boat in a rental car. If all is well at the boat, currently located near Pensacola, just on the Alabama side of the bay, we’ll be bound for Knoxville up the river. We’ll be taking this route, Mobile to the Tombigbee Waterway to the Tennessee river, then past Chattanooga to Knoxville.
You can see how the Tennessee is one of the few rivers to run south to north for a section. We won’t be on that, although you can take that and get to the Mississippi. Great Loopers typically do not use the Mississippi, it’s just too big and has too few amenities. We’ll travel about 900 miles and go through I think 13 locks, the last one being the one at Lenoir City near Cheryl’s house. We’ll have to watch currents, tree snags, and get really good at going through locks. I’ve done this trip before and one the amazing things about it is, once you leave Mobile, you don’t go through a major city until you get to Chattanooga. I had no idea you could go that far and not run into a city. There are fishing villages, small towns and marinas along the way, and you can see the lights of Huntsville at night when you are near, but that’s it. Our destination is a slip at Louisville Landing Marina off Topside Road near my house. I expect it’ll take two to three weeks. This is almost twice as many miles as our Cape Coral to Pensacola run. If we need a break we’ll park the boat, rent a car and come home for a bit. Like I have said other places here, this is an adventure and an experiment, not a boat delivery with a deadline. Once we get the boat here we’ll do some tinkering with it and play with it, take it out for weekends, down to Chattanooga, that kind of thing while we decide when to leave on the Great Loop trip. We have all kinds of options, like we might run down to the Bahamas just for this winter then back up here and then head out on the big trip in 2025, or we might leave this coming fall, or or or. We can and will do whatever feels right.
I expect the unexpected, hopefully in a positive manner. I wrote a blog years ago on the sailboat, and one of my favorite posts is an adventure we had on this very same trip:
The waterway itself, in red on the map, 234 miles long, built over 8 years, opened in 1985, connects the Tennessee river with the Tombigbee River, allowing a tremendous shortcut to the port of Mobile, AL and then the Gulf. The waterway was one of the biggest earth-moving projects in history, bigger than the Suez or the Panama canal projects. It is one big ditch!
“You can almost forget yourself –
all your troubles and your past –
all the ways life seems to leave you wrecked –
it all just disappears –
and then you are free.” The barbarian, on voyaging by sea.
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