Restart What I Never Finished

I never finished the blog in the spring when we returned to Chattanooga.  It is so exciting to see our old friends and it was a whirlwind as soon as we arrived.
The summer seemed to fly by with house building and doing things on the boat we never had time for over the winter.  The boat list is still not complete, but I think it is actually a little shorter which is quite an accomplishment in the boating world.
After spending a fun weekend in downtown Chattanooga with lots of our boating friends here, we made one last drive to Murphy, North Carolina and back for a dental appointment on Monday.  That gave us the ability to depart this morning around 7:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time.  We wanted it to be bright enough to see debris in the water from all of the rain.  That worked out well until we got to Williams Island where the fog set in.  It wasn't terribly thick and dissipated soon after we entered it.  The patchy fog lingered for several hours but never seemed to be less than about a quarter mile sight distance.  That made for a delay in the 60 degree temperature to climb to 80, but it did.
An hour and a half into our trip we entered Central Time Zone.  That put us at our usual anchorage around 11:00 a.m. Central Daylight Time.  That seemed way too early to stop for the day, so we continued on with a few options in mind for anchoring ahead.  At 11:25 a.m. we were in Nickajack Lock for about a 35 foot drop in water level.  About an hour later we entered the state of Alabama.  I told Ray that if he heard shots being fired it would probably be at his Georgia burgee flag flying on the bow.
The day was filled with bald eagle sightings and several up bound pleasure craft presumably taking a side trip on their Great Loop excursion before the rendezvous at Joe Wheeler State Park coming up shortly.  It is always our intention to stay well ahead of that influx of boaters.  Between that and trying to meet up with "The Bar-B", our longtime cruising buddies, we put a lot of miles under the keel today, especially for us.  We ended up anchoring just east of Goose Pond after 11 hours and 84 miles of travel.