Coffeeville AL to Tensaw Anchorage (Near Mt Vernon AL) @ mile marker 39.5 (to the Gulf!)

The sunrise this morning was beautiful.   Did they started out great but quickly went downhill.  

There is a device called AIS that communicates between commercial vessels and some recreational vessels that have the equipment.  It's very helpful to know a tugboat is pushing a load around the bend you're about to enter.  

When we entered the river this morning from our Anchorage we were literally pinched between two tugboats pushing big loads.  Well not literally pinched but we were between them.  

Normally to say you're between Saviour and Divine Mercy one is speaking in spiritual terms.   That would be a good thing.  But when one tugboat is named Saviour and another one is named Divine Mercy it's not quite the same.    We came across Redeemer later in the day as well.  He decided to pull out in front of our buddy boats...  

One can tell that we are in Alabama by the name of the boats... There is tremendous influence here from New Orleans.  

Today was another absolutely spectacular day on the water.   Because we were trapped between tugboats and there were a number of pleasure boats between us and the lock the lockmaster got confused.   Well, technically the lockmaster was just uninformed because the previous shift left and didn't tell him what he was setting him up for.   So three boats snuck down drove around all of the tugboats and stuck themselves into the lock before the lockmaster was informed that they were not waiting.  There were other boats who were pleasure boats that were waiting and had been told to go up and around the bend so they could handle the tug that was waiting.  

In the end the lockmaster got frustrated, the tugboats got frustrated and we got frustrated.  We ended up having to wait about 3 hours when we could have gone right away because of the confusion.  Such as life. This is the longest wait we had for a lock which is pretty good.  We've heard of people waiting 8 hours or 12 hours for a lock passage. 

The lower Tombigbee River is really really twisty.  There isn't much on it for hours and then you come across things like this.  They are building a stainless steel mill and it looks like they're building a stadium.  This picture only really shows a little more than half of it.  

In the end we found our anchorage on the Tensaw river cutoff and we have anchored for the night with two boats we traveled with today.  

Because we were held up for hours, we would not reach our anchorage in daylight unless we went fast.  So we went fast...   It is really undesirable to come across tugboats pushing big loads in the dark even when you have your lights on.  Especially when you don't know the river bottom.   There are sticks and logs you have to drive around almost all of the time...  Propellers do not like logs.  

Another successful day on the boat.  We are now in brackish water.  There are tides here.  The tide software says there were three tides today which is totally weird.  Apparently where the moon is and where the Sun is and the time of those things means that one low tide happened just after midnight and the third one will happen before.   

There is one more thing today that I didn't realize happened.  We had conditions that made it look like there were two suns.  It is called a sun dog and technically there's a rainbow on the left little sun :). 

I like to learn something everyday and I certainly did today... 

As you can see we're moving at 6:04 a.m. but it took till after 10:00 to clear the lock.  4 hours to cover an area that should have been 30 minutes.   Then you can see in yellow the places we went fast.  We burned lots of diesel today but we made up for lost time...

Once we realized we would make it before sundown we slowed down again to looper speed...  The engines need to really run once in a while anyway.