Saturday September 25, 2021.
Temp: 76/53, Humidity: 56/96%, Top Wind: NW6 mph, Precip: a little morning rain, Miles Traveled: 73 in less than 7 hours
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It’s hard to convince the sleeping beauties (both of us) that it’s morning when we’re docked under cover. It is much harder for the sunshine to find it’s way into our bedroom in the bow of the boat! So when the alarm says it’s time to get up, we have to trust it. 😩 What was weird was that in our sleepy state, we kept hearing things dropping on the bow. I knew it couldn’t be rain, but I really hoped it wasn’t giant blobs of spider poop!! Or bird poop. So THAT is what made me get up, so I could look. It was big drops of water, from condensation on the underside of the roof. Well darn, now I was up. Might as well get atum.
We pulled out of the marina just after 7:00. Sunrise in these here parts is at 6:40 now that we’re officially in the Autumn season. Clarksville has a really big bend in the river, so Captain was watching the AIS closely. At least we didn’t have any fog today! But wouldn’t you know it, he spied three tows in the area. One was just sitting on the left bank. Another one was backing up really slowly from the right to the left, and the third was pedal to the metal coming up the river. We heard the three of them talking on the radio…. not that we understood much of anything that they said. I swear they talk in code that resembles cajun, and we have no idea how they know what each other is saying. Kenny did give a holler to the one coming up, and asked how he’d like us to proceed. The tow captain’s response was something like, ‘just find a hole and go for it where ever you like’. Oh great! 😳 We could tell that we were going to be right in the middle of this tow dance!
But sure enough, a nice hole opened up in between them, so we just slid on through. Kenny picked up our speed a bit to get out of the way as quickly as we safely could. The good news is, we didn’t get squished.
We had some rain showers for about an hour around 8:30, so we went downstairs for awhile. Then back upstairs when it quit. I opened the drivers window, but the wind from our own 11 mph was brisk and chilly on the face and driver’s hands, so we closed it again. It’s just so hard to drive with it closed because it distorts the view. I think Captain is going to have some other kind of rigid plastic sewn in to replace what we have. Now that we figured out that we can snap them back to the bimini frame and don’t need to roll those windows anymore, a rigid better quality isinglass would be mucho bettero.
This was funny. The red arrow is us, and we’re following the Cumberland River up to Lake Barkley. If you look straight to the left/west of us, there is a blue pin. That is the marina where we plan to be at, day after tomorrow. It’s just right there! But, we have to go all the way up to Grand Rivers, and then back down the Tenneessee River/Kentucky Lake to get there. Too bad we aren’t licensed for over-the-road travel! Today’s destination is the blue pin up on the right of Lake Barkley. That red guy with his arms in the air is the TN/KY state line. We’ll be popping back into Kentucky today.
Up on this hill were several cannons pointed down stream. This is Fort Donelson which is part of the National Park Service. Following the surrender of Confederate Fort Donelson on Sunday, February 16, 1862, the Union victory elated the North, and stunned the South. Within days of the surrender, Clarksville and Nashville would fall into Union hands. Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and his troops had created a pathway to victory for the Union.
The scenery was really pretty along the river and lake. There is a nice big house up on the hill in the trees.
The father down stream we got, the more logs and forest scrap we encountered. We really had to watch where we were going and try to cross the streams of debris as it zigzagged down the river and lake in the current.
There were hundreds of white pelicans! This is just a few of them.
As we turned north, the Cumberland River became Lake Barkley, and widened out quite a bit. We still had debris floating along in our path.
We finally made it to the Prizer Point KOA Campground and Marina. When I made the reservation, they gave me slip number E-45 and told me to call when we were coming into the marina. I called them on the phone to let them know we were coming in, and to ask where E-45 was. There’s a map on their website that showed E dock as the first one when we come in, so I asked if our slip was on the side facing us, or did we need to go around between docks E and D? Our slip would be on the outside toward the end. OK, thanks! Nobody came out to help. The outside of the dock was just flat with no cleats or numbers, with houseboats in the slips on the other side. Hmmm. We meandered around looking for slip numbers, and went between D & E. I finally saw some numbers, and counted back to the end of the dock. The end actually had a number on it – E-43, and there were cleats to tie to. OK, where is E-45? The wind was blowing us around, so we finally just pulled up to the end, tied up, and I got out on the dock and went looking. Sure enough, E-45 was on the front face of the walking dock, with no bumpers on the poles and no cleats. But there was a power box, so we moved around to our assigned spot, and Captain was NOT happy. Here’s a zoomed in shot of where we were parked. A description that we’d be on the FACE DOCK with no protection from the metal dock and poles while boat wakes rock and roll us, rather than a SLIP would have been helpful to know ahead of time. Or a dockhand would have been helpful. It had been a long day, and this was frustrating. Captain was mad, I felt bad and responsible because I picked the place, so I felt like he was mad at me. 🥺. I’m overly sensitive that way.
We went inside the store to check in, and it took awhile to get somebody’s attention. A young man finally asked if he could help, and when we said we just pulled into E-45 as a transient for the night, he said he didn’t work in this area. OK. Another lady was answering questions about a pontoon boat rental and went outside with those people. She came back asked what we needed, handed us a piece of paper to hang in our winsheild as our parking permit. I said we were on a boat? “Same thing”, and she went back outside. Another lady finally came over and asked if she could help? I said again, we just pulled in to slip E-45 and came in to register as requested. She checked the computer and saw that we already paid, so said we were good. OK, but are there any bathroom codes or gate codes or wifi codes? Oh – yes, she gave us a bathroom code. Wi-fi is open but weak. That’s it. That’s all we got. No further information about anything. Alrighty then.
We moseyed back out to the boat, put more fenders out and relaxed for awhile. Then I decided to wander around the campground and check it out. There were very few empty camping spaces, since it is the weekend and nice weather. They have all kinds of game areas. You could have a big corn-hole competition here! And there was a giant rubber bubble thing in the back where kids were bouncing.
This was one of the pools, which was great because it had a whole greenhouse sliding enclosure deal. There were lots of kids inside playing and adults catching rays.
It’s a beautiful setting, but boats do go zooming by. I don’t know where they’re going because this is a cove. We had lots of waves bonking us and rolling us so that our lines would go tight which pulled and jerked on the boat. Grrrr. While we were out adjusting things, one of the local house boat guys came over and asked why we were docked here in this spot, because it isn’t a great place to be. He was very nice and suggested that we move to the end of the dock for a better experience. We explained why we were in E-45 – that we were told this is where we were to be. He just shook his head and didn’t have good things to say about this third set of managment they’d had for the marina in the last few years. He said he’d go in for us and demand that we be able to move to the end. We thanked him but we said we’d be gone first thing in the morning, and the boat wakes would likely stop after sunset. He was upset, and said that the KOA doesn’t give much of a hoot about the marina. Yep – that was obvious. He said that even when boats come in for fuel, nobody comes out to offer help OR even to take payment! Oh well… we’ll move on in the morning, and not recommend the place to anybody. It is like night and day compared to the friendly personal service that we got at the Lake Barkley State Park marina a few days ago, just five miles up the lake from here.
There is a little restaurant here, but we had no desire to spend many more money here, so we had a simple grilled cheese and tomato soup dinner. (CheezeSoupMatoSamich is what our family calls it.). 😏
Here was our journey today. 73 miles dodging logs makes for a long day. Tomorrow, we will continue north, cross over to the Kentucky Lake to the west, and turn south again. We will follow that waterway all the way down to the bottom of this picture and beyond. I made some reservations for the next few nights. We are way ahead of “schedule”, meaning that we’re nearly a month ahead of when we thought we’d be here. Oh well. We haven’t found or thought of any place we want to hang out for very long. Maybe we’ll get home by the first of November?! The only reason we wouldn’t want to get home too early is hurricanes – especially in the Florida panhandle. I guess we’ll just keep an eyeball on the tropics!
OH! And then…. while we’re hanging out, with no TV, no wi-fi, and sketchy cellular, and it’s comfortable enough to not have the air conditioning, it was really quiet. Until we heard some thumping. That was odd. Sometimes we hear a thump or two when a bird lands on the bow, but this was above us in the fly bridge. 😳 So we turned on the outside lights and didn’t see anything. Kenny took a flighlight and shined it up into the flybridge. Pretty soon, he saw a little black nose and two beedy eyeballs looking back at him through a Zorro mask. It was a small racoon. He was up underneath the helm dash, behind the canvas. Oh great! How do we get him to leave? Kenny backed away and I pounded on the ceiling. The little guy finally meandered out and found that going down a ladder is much harder than going up one!
We watched him as he slowly made his way down the ladder, into the cockpit, out over the edge, and down the dockline to the dock. Then he went across and climbed down underneath the dock! We wondered if that’s his spot, because we are quite a ways from shore! I just hope he doesn’t decide to sleep on board and we end up with a stowaway tomorrow!