IF YOU'D LIKE TO MAKE A CALL...

Left in the morning with 2 other sailboats and headed for the lock.  It was thick with water hyacinth, really bad.  This picture is after we got tied up, we came through all this stuff!

We got tied up and heard a call on the radio that 3 power boats were coming to join us too.  You can see them in the picture above.  One came in and was a catamaran-style and I snapped this one of him with some of the green stuff sticking to his bow.  

One of the power boats was off the wall and moving before the lockmaster even sounded the horn that is the OK signal to proceed out of the lock.  John had to tell them to slow down as they were leaving wake.  You do not want any waves in the lock as they just bounce off one wall and go back to the other repeatedly and make maneuvering in there even more challenging.  I think the folks had good intentions as they have a huge bow and were trying to push the green stuff out of the way.  They ended up getting some caught in their prop and stopped in front of us.  Needless to say my captain was not happy with them!  They passed us by and shortly were off in to the distance.

This goes into the category of "you never know what you are to see".  Here we are floating down the river and everything has been pretty uniform so far today...a few herons, egrets and eagles but really nothing new for some time.  And then all of a sudden we see this.  

Got love people with a sense of humor!!  Cell service was bad, we almost pulled over to make a call!

Got down to the Tom Bevill Lock and Dam.  They have an old snag catcher boat, the USS Montgomery on display.  

We considered anchoring nearby and going in to check it out but it was only noon and we felt we needed to make more headway.  Rodalee anchored here and the Wendy, the other sailboat from Alaska was breaking in a new transmission so they were going very slow so into the lock we go, solo.  Hard to believe this is the first lock we have been in by ourselves.  

Found another little anchorage at Cook's Bend in an oxbow.  An oxbow is the original part of the river flowage before the Army Corps of Engineers realigned it to make it a navigable waterway thereby creating the Tenn-Tom.