Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Coffeeville Lock is the last of the “Dirty Dozen Locks” on the
Tem-Tom. After this lock, there are no more locks until the gulf. The day was beautiful. A little fog, but not much, and we headed out
at 7 AM with hopes of locking right through the Coffeeville lock, 8.5 miles
away. We saw no barges, and about two miles up the river, after repeated
efforts to raise the lockmaster by radio, Kathy called lock on her cell, told him our
position, and asked about locking through.
No problem, we will be ready for you was the response. Just radio us when you are about a mile away
(at our speed, that is 10 minutes). And so we did.
At that point we were informed that there was a northbound
tow in the lock, and we would have to wait until it locked through. Drat, there goes an hour.
So we took some pictures of the lock, and made lazy circles
upriver until it was our turn.
About a half hour later, we hear a southbound tow hailing
the lock. He was two miles away. We were informed that we would need to wait
for that tow to clear the lock. (Commercial boats have precedence over
everything except for an emergency boat). Drat!
There goes another hour!
The northbound tow clears the lock, and we hear the
Southbound tow telling the northbound tow that he will wait where he is until
the southbound tow passes him. Drat,
another ½ hour.
So for all of our good intentions, we lost 2.5 hours of
daylight. Luckily it was warm, and for
once, we started taking off layers of clothes!
We traveled the rest of the distance, tried to enter the
anchorages that we had planned on. It
was silted in and we ran aground (or rather, a muck). Tim backed out the boat, and we headed back
to the channel, both of us trying to figure out Plan B. The next anchorage was
another 20 miles. Four hours, and sunset
is coming upon us fast.
“Southbound sail boat, southbound sail boat, this is the tow
that is about 1 mile behind you. You
plannin’ to anchor in the river tonight, Captain?”
Tim allowed as we didn’t have much choice.
The tow captain responded, “Well Captain, if you look to
starboard (right), you can see an indentation that is about 10 feet deep 8 feet
from shore. That’d be a fine place to
anchor and be out of the way of the towboats goin’ either north or south. And then they can see you too.”
Tim and I looked at each other and said, “Hell, these guys
are on this river all the time…sounds like good advice to us." We thanked the tow captain, and headed over
that way.
As soon as we got
there, the tow captain came on and told us that we were exactly where we needed
to be, and to have a good night. We
thanked him and off he went.
We set two anchors, had a chicken and macaroni salad, and
went to bed.
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