As we continued up the waterway, there were numbers of tugs and barges, a few ski boats and lots of fisherman. I've started to get pretty comfortable with the tug/ barge traffic. Interestingly, most of the ones we encountered were coming downstream. As long as these guys don't totally take their half out of the middle it's not too bad passing. The ones going in the same direction can be a little tricky. You call these on the radio and negotiate how the pass will be done. The folks fishing along the banks are a bit if a pain though. They're often hard to see and you have to slow down to a no wake speed to keep from blowing them out. The others are the ones that tend to be humorous - particularly the guys who decide that they just want to blow by full speed. Watching them fly off the wake behind the boat is like seeing Evel Knievel try to jump the Grand Canyon. Stuff is flying around, people are bouncing off the seats, one guy lost his ball cap and it goes on and on.
Mixed in with all of this activity were our next three locks. We locked up through Hefflin, Belvil and Stennis Dams. After some shaky experiences with the first two locks the day before, these went pretty well. I handled the boat through them all and by the last one, Regina was working it like a pro!! She is in charge of roping one of the floating bollards and tying off to keep the boat under control. In the process, she has perfected the "rabbit hole knot" - that's a bowline to all of you who weren't scouts.
Three miles after the last lock is Columbus Marina. Nice quiet little place where we met Mike and Jo who live on their 42 foot Silverton. We shared one of the courtesy cars and went into town for dinner. By the time we got back, it was down for the count. I didn't even hear the huge thunderstorm that hit in the middle of the night.
Sunday morning began by drying the helm from the thunderstorm. Learned my lesson about leaving the windows open. At least the rain did wash the rest of the boat as well. We're beginning to get he Gulf salt all washed off.
This was planned to be a short day - about 60 miles and 4 locks. So we cruised out about 9, headed north up the channel for the first lock about 20 miles away. Our now experienced two person team zipped through Aberdeen lock and then about an hour later Amory lock. Thinking we were certainly now set to reach our destination early, we got to Wilkens lock in time to watch a tug/barge enter ahead of us. Then the lock master told us we would also have to wait for a south bound tug/barge to go thru before we could continue. By the time we got out of the lock and moving again, we had lost an hour. Now it was a run to try to get to Fulton lock before the barge did, but no such luck. We caught up with him about a mile before the lock so it was twiddling time again.
From the lock to Mid-Way Marina is about 3 miles. We arrived about 3:30 and after completing all of the usual chores, decided to go to town for an early dinner and Wal-Mart stop. The marina has a courtesy car so off we went for a Mexican restaurant everyone had told us about. It was time for chips, salsa and a big margarita - until we discovered this was a dry county. Well, at least we got chips and salsa!
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