Up the Ohio and the Tennesee

One of the challenges ahead of us was crossing the flooded dam and lock upstream. This dam is called a wicket dam. When the water is relatively low the wickets are raised to hold back the water and boats go through a lock around the dam. When water is high, the wickets are lowered and boats must navigate over that section of the dam where the lowered wickets are located. In this picture, one can see some of the turbulence the flow of water over these lowered wickets produces. At one point, we were only able to go 1.8 mph against the current over ground. We talked to some people whose boats had to get towed to make it past this area.

We were eventually able to slug our way up the Ohio to its junction with the Tennessee at Paducah. There we found relief from the strong current of the Ohio as the Tennessee was flowing at a far slower rate. From Paducah we made our way to Kentucky Lake and the canal that connects the Tennessee with the Cumberland River. This marina, Green Turtle Bay was our home for one week as we recuperated from the Ohio and met up with many of our traveling companions and fellow loopers. It was here that we learned that one of our trawler friends was still anchored in the Ohio current waiting rescue from Green Turtle towboats. A loose marker buoy had floated near his boat and the cable had wrapped around his driveshaft stopping the boat. Five days later they finally got the boat in at Green Turtle and hauled out for repairs.