Wolf Island, TN

Day 73, October 13th, 2009

Knowing it was going to be another battle against the current, we were up early and had the anchor up at 7:00 a.m. Good thing too, the current was worse. It had poured with rain the night before and didn't think about all the water that had collected in the dinghy! When we were only going 2.5 knots with the RPM flat out, we had to look for a reason. So while John held the boat idling in the current, I let the dinghy down, scrambled in and baled a bathtub full of water out of the poor little dinghy!!! It helped a lot - we were back up to 3.5 knots and the engine sounded a lot easier!!!

Trouble struck in the afternoon. John had been watching out to avoid debris all day but he missed that one!!! All of a sudden there was an awful thumping on the bottom of the boat. He spilled his mug of tea as he stood up fast and cut the throttle into neutral. When he tried to put it back into gear there was a rhythmic banging below again. "Oh no!" We both figured we had either bent the shaft or damaged the propeller. Big Bucks!!! Twice 's Nice came up beside us and we told them we thought we were in trouble. The anchorage was only about 5 miles away. Paul and John reckoned they could tow us in, where we could better assess our position. Paul managed to throw us a line and he edged forward with us in tow. All of a sudden there was another awful thumping and then out the stern popped this great big log about 14 ft long!!! John tried the engine again and guess what - smoooooth!!!! No banging, no vibration, all was well after all!!! The log must somehow have been caught and the forward movement of the tow shook it off. We were so relieved. These things are hard on the nerves!!!

We still felt edgy when we anchored for the night behind Wolf Island. There was a tremendous current there and the boat was swinging quite wildly from left to right and back again. However, things did calm down and we had an uneventful night.