Traveling the Tennessee

A cold Kentucky Lake & a lovely Tennessee river.

We are now travelling with a buddy boat “Knot Sew Easy” (Liz & Bob) along the Tennessee River and the upper part - the Kentucky Lake. This was formed in 1944 when the Tennessee Valley Authority dammed the river and flooded many towns to construct the Kentucky Dam. It is one of the largest man made bodies of water in the world covering 160,000 acres. On our chart plotter it shows the roads & railways underwater that existed before the flooding. We have only met one tow over the 2 days but our strongest memory will be of the freezing weather. The wind is bitterly cold with early mist and some slight rain. We have on hats, gloves, many layers of clothing & I even had to wrap up in a rug to keep out the cold – this is while driving from the upper helm. We anchored out the first night in Leather wood Creek and spent the second night at Pebble Isle marina.

The cold misty weather persisted the next day & kept us in the marina for another day. We borrowed the marina's courtesy car & visited the local museum that showed history of a Civil War battle fought in Johnsonville – one of the towns that was flooded by the dam. We also enjoyed the music of a duo in the marina restaurant called Professor and the Bull – country/blue grass type music.

Next day was still too miserable to travel so we took the courtesy car, wandered aimlessly trying to find something to visit & finally ended up at a winery & did some wine tasting in a small village called Paris !– a diversion from the boat for a few hours.

We awoke to a wind free, clear, warm, flat water day. It actually got very hot – hard to imagine the freezing previous day. The scenery improved – trees starting to change colour, interesting strated rock cliffs, & 100's of monarch butterflies struggling across the river. We rafted up with “Knot Sew Easy” & anchored in a side creek behind Eagle Nest Island – a calm & peaceful spot. This next day we made an effort to get to the Pickwick Lock which we had heard was having problems with the big commercial lock (under repair) and was having to split tows & send them through the smaller auxiliary lock that the pleasure boats usually go through so we knew we'd have a wait. The last 2 hours we only idled towards the lock, eventually arriving at 2.15 and 9 of us locking through finally at 4.00pm.The day up until this time had been lovely – a very scenic region, many houses on stilts (to avoid the flood waters) or perched way up on the sides of cliffs – some very precariously – one with no ground left under their front deck. Saw bald eagles, some Amish fishermen & their horse & buggy parked on the side of the river and a very large heron which to me could be called The greater,grey,ruffled, crested heron. We reached the Pickwick State Park Marina – a very wooded, quiet & natural well maintained area.

You will find that the photos won't sync with the text for a while while we try and work with Windows 10.