During the leisurely—and by that we mean painfully slow against the current—and uneventful cruise from Cuba Landing to Clifton, we took stock of the major rivers we’ve visited so far. We understand that we may not’ve seen the best parts of some of these, and our perceptions may be skewed by things like weather, lockmasters (That’s right, we’re looking at you dude at Marseilles), debris and current (Potomac, you’re pretty gross. Ohio, you’re disgusting), and quality of marinas (Mississippi, you’re the worst). Anyway, here’s the list.*
1. Trent/Severn (The waterway incorporates both the Trent River and the Severn River, so we lumped them together.)
2. St. Lawrence
3. Hudson
4. Tennessee
5. Cumberland
6. Oswego
7. Chicago
8. Potomac
9. Illinois
10. Delaware
11. Des Plaines
12. Mississippi
13. Ohio
Anyway, the Tennessee River is awesome.
Know who wants to steal some of this beautiful Tennessee water? Those snivelers down in Georgia, that’s who. Every few years some peach-for-brains state legislator claims that because of a 200-year-old survey mistake, the state line should be moved north to allow Georgia a pipeline size piece of Nickajack Lake so they can start sucking. Which frankly they do as well as anybody, but that’s not the point.
The point is that if they just dynamited Athens—and the parts of Atlanta that don’t include our nephew Doug and his wonderful wife and sons—they wouldn’t even need that water. Problem solved. Win-win. Plus they already have a river, albeit one that probably still is clogged up with Wayne Williams victims. And they seem to overlook the untold billions they would owe in reparations to the poor saps who went to bed one night happy Tennesseeans and woke up on the side of the eternally-damned the next morning. It’s also possible that Georgia doesn’t even want the actual water but instead saw this marina and thinks the river carries mermaids they can put on display. Or date.
In summation, Go Vols.
Remember the rules about navigation lights? There also are rules about day shapes. We don’t know those rules, of course, but sometimes we look them up for fun. Today we saw a textbook example of day shapes on a dredge.
Pretty cool, huh? Although AIS is much easier. Thanks to our chartplotter we knew it was a dredge long before we could make out balls and diamonds.
A few miles later later we turned into an impossibly-small approach and wedged in amongst a Looper crowd at the Clifton City Recreational Marina, where we reconnected with our old pals John and Marilyn on Blue Goose. We last saw them at Half Moon Bay on the Hudson.
TVA runs the dams around here and apparently doesn’t care about our comfort. The flood water is ripping downstream of the Pickwick Dam as they release it, so we likely will hang around Clifton until Wednesday.
Could be much worse. Could be Joliet.
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*Note: Ranked order not completely unanimous, as in “What the hell are you thinking? That river was ugly/gorgeous! You have it way too high/low.”