12-21 Demopolis to mm 123 Okatuppa Creek.

We all want to be in Mobile for Christmas and the weather may be taking a turn for the worse so we started out really early this morning, 6:30. What ?! Snow in the south?! Nope, foam from pollution and churning water at the dam. But given the season, it made us feel at home, sort of.

This was an exciting moment that pictures can’t do justice to. Brown Eyed Girl hailed the Captain of the tug who gave us permission to pass on his 2 whistle (aka starboard or right). But after Brown Eyed Girl passed him the barge turned to it’s right, towards us instead of staying left. As I said before, the river becomes really winding here. The part that you can’t see in the photo is that this is taking place around a hairpin turn and close behind us is land, there was no where for us to go and the barge was heading right at us! These barges really move and push a lot of water, giving us a limited amount of control over the boat. We got through okay but Dave still hasn’t quite gotten over almost being hit by a huge barge. Objects in the photo were much closer than they appear.



Now we are safely up a creek. This is an anchorage that Brown Eyed Girl knew about and we never would have found ourselves. Because it is so narrow we had to throw out two anchors, bow and stern, to keep us from swinging into land.








Dave hailed Geronimo (they went through the lock with us this morning) to let them know about the anchorage, but once again it was too shallow for them and they went on to find another spot. It got cold (hard frost), but we had the most amazing starry night.






I thought that would be the end of my post for the day, but we had some excitement later on that is worth mentioning. We went to bed early, but at 2:38 am the anchor alarm sounded! For the non-boaters reading this an anchor alarm sounds when the boat is at anchor and moves more than a pre-set distance, in our case 50 feet. This meant that suddenly our anchors weren’t holding. Yikes! So we scrambled up and tried to figure out what happened. Fortunately we hadn’t drifted into shore, the shipping channel or Brown Eyed Girl. We weren’t comfortable trying to re-set the anchor in the dark with ice on the deck, so Dave monitored the GPS to see how much we were moving, getting up every ½ hour to see where we were. This could be a real problem if the anchor lines got tangled together under the boat or around the props. In the morning we had done a complete 180 in the creek. Brown Eyed Girl had the same problem, so we suspect the dam increased the water level in the pool, which made our anchor lines too short to hold. We were pretty lucky there was no damage other than a rough nights sleep.