Brrrr!

In the week since I last posted autumn has started to catch up with us.  We wake up with condensation dripping on our faces and we can see our breath amid the steam from our morning coffee.  We bought a Mr. Buddy propane heater at Walmart last week which helps warm up the cabin first thing.  Luckily the days have been sunny and warm so we don't get too miserable. The kids aren't bothered by the cold because they are usually still in bed for the worst of it.

We continue to find great anchorages, see spectacular sunrises and sunsets, and get a few surprises along the way.

Being up early for a long day has some advantages.

An abandoned dock at the site of a former grain silo on the Tennessee River

  

A cow watching the boats go by but not a farm in sight.

  

At the end of our journey on the Tennessee River the current was against us.
As much as 4 mph and we can only go 6.5!

On Pickwick Lake we turned off the Tennessee River and onto the Tenn Tom waterway. 
The waterway is man made so I enjoyed looking at all the engineering - like these baffles
which slow the flow of water into the canal.  They look like giant Plinko boards
from "The Price is Right"

The topography varies greatly as we head south.  At times it looked a little like Georgian Bay...

...and then very different just a few miles away.

Until today we haven't seen many other Loopers for several weeks other than the ones we travel with frequently - Ed and Shannon aboard Darwin, and Ben aboard Wrangler. Today all the Loopers suddenly appeared out of nowhere as we began our journey through the first of the many Tenn-Tom locks. In the first lock we were one of 8 boats, by the third we were one of 13.  I loved driving the boat through all the traffic and meeting other boaters as we rafted to them in the lock.

A 360 degree view of the crowded lock.

We now have a busy 2 weeks as we run down to Mobile, AL and get the mast put back up. There aren't many places to stop from here on down (even just to anchor) so we will have several long days.  Since the locks put commercial traffic through ahead of recreational, they provide a level of uncertainty which makes it hard to plan our day with 100% accuracy.