Foiled?

Captain's Log - Day 21

It's officially been three weeks! Not bad, eh?

Another uneventful day of boating cut short by thunderstorms. Just as the storm hit, we were rounding a bend into a section of the river riddled with islands. Not the best place to have twenty feet of visibility, so we pulled out of the main channel and dropped anchor.

Saw a few interesting things today - one of which is what appears to be a partially submerged building. We were going to tag it with the Plan C logo that Rob and Kate invented, but we didn't have any spray paint.

Probably the coolest thing I saw today was a hawk swooping down at the river, grabbing a fish, and bringing it back to the nest atop a day marker. Pretty exciting to see things that I've only previously witnessed through the Discovery or National Geographic channels!

Also saw this crazy, steampunk looking pulley system for a drawbridge we passed under. I'm a sucker for steampunk!

For awhile there on the Mississippi, non commercial boats were scarce. Here on Kentucky Lake, however, they're all over the place and I'm reminded of an aspect of boating culture that we experienced up north. Everyone waves to everyone else.

There are other vehicular communities that do this too. Motorcyclists for example. As a biker, I can share that if you're going down the highway and another biker doesn't throw you a wave it's like a slap in the face. It's actually made riding the Big Ruckus difficult. It doesn't command much respect - only about 10% of bikers wave to me.

Now the boater wave is not like the biker wave, which is kind of a reverse heil. Don't get any crazy ideas; we're not throwing each other reverse heils because were crazy neo-nazis (although to be fair, the biker community may contain proportionally more of those than society at large). No, it's all about aerodynamics. If you stick up an open palm and wave it, the wind is gonna catch your palm and arm and make keeping your balance tough.

Anyway, boaters wave like everyone else, except they wave to pretty much everyone.

But I've been stalling. Let me get to the reason for the title of this post - the guy who was going to transport our boat around the closed locks almost doubled his price today! The boat transporting business must be good because we haven't found anyone else willing to transport Plan C for a price that isn't silly (i.e. half the value of the boat).

So we find ourselves faced with a few options if we don't find a way around these locks.

Option 1 - Stay on the Tennessee River and follow it all the way to Knoxville.

Option 2 - Go back to the Mississippi (a three day journey) and see if Plan C holds enough gas to make through the 300+ mile marina-free stretches before and after Memphis.

Option 3 - Sell Plan C in the next couple days, buy a couple kayaks and head to Mobile, portaging around the closed locks - the timing on this one is tricksy (hobbitses).

Let us know what you think! Vote! I'm not going to push a P Diddy style "vote or die" campaign ("what does that even mean?!"). This is more a "please vote ... unless your don't want to or just can't be bothered" campaign.