A post by Mark
The adventure continues. As I mentioned in my last post, we followed the lockmaster’s advice and anchored in a small inlet about 15 miles downstream of his lock. If you will recall, he told us there would be plenty of water. He also told us the water would be increasing 1 to 2 feet overnight (a detail I left out last night – figuring it would be irrelevant). Anyway, he was wrong…
We started at 4 1/2′ of water – a little uncomfortable for us – but enough. The next morning, I get up for my regular dinghy ride to the shore with Wille and notice that there is now a significant riverbank on both sides of the inlet, where previously, there was none. When I get to the boat ramp where Willie and I get to shore, the bottom of the ramp is no-longer in the water. The water level didn’t go up 1 to 2 feet – it dropped 1 to 2 feet.
This isn’t good – was the lockmaster messing with us?
We had some hope – as our guidebook told us that we should expect a tidal change of 1 to 2 feet. It must be low tide now – right???
We start to slowly make our way out of the inlet. We get turned around and make it about 30 feet before our first grounding. We’re going really slowly, so, I’m able to back-up before we get stuck and try to reposition the boat to find some deeper water. Another few wiggles with the boat and we make it another 10′ or so. And then, we stop. We are in 3 1/2 feet of water and stuck in the mud. Note: at this time, we’ve abandoned our depth sounder and are now sticking our boat hook in the water to measure the depth.
So – on to the anchor trick. After a lot of work getting the anchor set, we’re able to pull ourselves out another 20 or so feet. We’re getting close to deep water!!! We now need to unstick our anchor and re-set it another 40 or 50 feet in front of the boat. After even more work, we get it re-set and start pulling. Based on the first few pulls, this last 40 feet are going to be the toughest. In the meantime, Julie calls the NOAA station in Mobile (the weather guys) to try to understand the tides, how much lift we can expect, etc. The NOAA guy has no idea what Julie is talking about – as the tides have absolutely no impact where we are (Is the guidebook writer messing with us?). He also tells us that the water-levels are forecasted to drop another 6″ today and even more the next day. This is looking less good by the minute. Julie then calls the lock, tells the lockmaster what’s up – and he says that there is a boat in the lock that he’ll ask to come help us. He also says that he’ll see if he can release some water from the dam to help – but we’re 15 miles downstream – so it will take quite some time for us to see the impact.
About an hour later – as we both exhausted from pulling (and making less and less headway), we see our saviors – not the boat from the lock, but a boat from the US Geological Survey that was coming out of the inlet to collect samples (water or mud – I never figured out which one). Anyway, they weren’t really excited to help – as they were worried about getting stuck, but I was able to explain how they could put their boat in the deep channel and I could bring them a 75′ line from our boat – so they wouldn’t have to get near the shallow water. Thankfully, they agreed – and in less than 5 minutes, we were free. Thank you USGS!!! It took a bit more work to get our anchor free (as we dug it in really deep), but eventually, we got it up and were on our way. Our 7 AM start turned into a 9 AM start.
I’m really looking forward to getting off of the river! We have one night left on the river. We pick an anchorage with 20′ of water! We should get there about 1 1/2 hours before sunset. Unless the guidebook is really, really wrong, we should be good!
Bye for now…