Day 197: Guntersville to Joe Wheeler State Park, Alabama
Day 197: Wednesday, November 9th: A long day was planned today so we were up before daylight (5:30am) and left Alred Marina as soon as we could see the channel markers in the dim light. We were "buddy boating" with new friends aboard Wings.
We arrived at the Guntersville Lock and Dam just a couple of minutes before a commercial tow called the lock from downstream. Had we been five minutes later, we would have had about a two hour delay waiting for the tow to lock through. Our guardian angels were still looking out for us!
As we entered the lock, Ruth started laughing. She had spotted this workboat on the other side of the lock wall:
We have a good friend named Derek (different spelling), and the boat made us think of him.
There were little machines that we kept seeing floating in the water whenever we were near one of the TVA's nuclear generating plants environmental monitoring stations. The name tells the story, but they were about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and look like this:
We never dawdled when we were passing one of the nuclear plants!
We caught up to our friends on Medora waiting for the railroad bridge in Decatur to open. We were both headed for Joe Wheeler State Park Marina for the night. They can make 17 mph so went on ahead and were waiting for us when we got there.
We enjoyed happy hour aboard Medora and were joined by one of our "geocaching" friends from Atlanta, Jerry Long. Jerry is now living in Huntsville and drove over to have a visit with us. It was fun to catch up with him. Oops! We didn't get a picture of him! Too bad.
With the early start, we were pretty tired and turned in early.
We locked through one more lock today for a trip total of 140.
Position tonight: N34 48.740 W087 19.847
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