Time&TideTravels: Cumberland River to Nashville

Sept 16, 2012

Because we have some time to kill, we decided it would be as good a time as any to do a little side trip. So we are going to Nashville!!!!!!!!!!

To get to Nashville from Green Turtle Bay, you have to go N/E through Barkley Lake via the Cumberland River.

The Kentucky Stae Penitentary
aka The Castle on the Cumberland

We passed a gorgeous building overlooking the river. I wondered if it was an old mansion or perhaps a museum of some sorts. NOT!! It is the state penitentiary, nicked named The Castle on the Cumberland. They have executed 161 people at this penitentiary. Such a shame, as the building is absolutely gorgeous. Apparently stone masons came all the way from Italy to work on it. I wonder why they put so much effort into building a jail?

Our first stop after GTB was a little marina called Eddy Creek. We stopped there because their fuel is a lot cheaper than GTB and they are on the way to Nashville. As soon as we got off the dock we were met by Larry from MV Lady KK. Larry and his wife are starting the Loop in a couple of weeks. They are heading to the rendezvous at Joe Wheeler and they really look forward to getting started.

The people here in Kentucky have the greatest accents. The young man who worked the fuel station kept calling me mam. Everyone here is very polite and very friendly, true Southerners!!

After we filled up with fuel, (Gary is ecstatic because our fuel consumption is down to 2.32 a gallon!!) we decided to take a walk around and ended up picking up some lunch at the restaurant on site. We shared Barkley Burger (as in the name of the lake) and cheesy fries. Delicious!!

Scenic Cumberland River

The channel markers on the lake and on the river are sketchy at best. And for some weird reason both of our chart plotters showed us way out of the channel while we could see we were well in between the markers. There were many deadheads in the river so we had to keep a close eye on the markers and on any debris that might foul up our prop (Someone asked me what a deadhead is, a deadhead is what you call a tree or a stump or a log in the water)

Sunday evening we stayed at Bumpus Mills Marina. Gary said if there is a kid playing the banjo on the porch he isn’t stopping (Ref the movie Deliverance) but thankfully there was just a friendly guy named Wally who runs the “Bass and Crappie Heaven”. He charged us $25 cash to stay the night and that included power, what a bargain!!

Wally - Bumpus Mills Marina

Again, he had the heaviest accent and half of the things he said, we had to ask him to repeat because we couldn’t understand him. But I know he said we were welcome to stay on our way back from Nashville.

Sept 17, 2012

It started to rain very hard during the night and when we left in the morning it was still raining. It rained pretty much all day, and it was a long and boring day. The landscape along the river never varied.

Rain falling on Ft Donelson,
From here the Confederate soldiers
leveled their fire at the Union fleet.

The Dover Hotel where on Sunday February 26, 1863
General Grant accepted the unconditional surrender from
the Confederate General Simon Buckner
(the first and only time during the Civil war that a large army surrendered unconditionally)

We passed Clarksville and decided not to stop there but push on to Harpeth Island.

Bypassing Clarksville,
all the while singing: "take the last train to Clarkville"

We anchored in a gorgeous spot as the rain continued falling softly.

Sept 18, 2012

Scenes from a river

The winds were stronger than we had experienced on the rivers thus far but the good thing was that it was on our stern. The wind push gave us a little power as we fought the current going upstream to Nashville.

By this time I seriously doubted our Nashville trip. The river is filled with dead heads; some logs the size of the back of our boat. The trip is boring, we never saw any other traffic, even the tugboat s were quiet and MIA. We wondered if we had made a mistake coming all this way…..

Nashville skyline in sight, note the Batman building?

At last we entered the Nashville city limits. The first thing we saw was a gentleman on the side of the river, saluting us at full attention. We just waved and though ….what’s up with that? It is nice but what????? We figured he must really like Canadians.

As we turned the last bend in the river and spotted Nashville’s skyline but we also saw a huge boat which is a landing craft for troop and vehicle deployment. At first I thought it was a Russian boat because of the weird writing but it turned out to be Greek. Our stay in Nashville had just begun……