We finished the Ten-Tom Canal and the Tombigbee River today and are in Demopolis, AL, which is a small town with a nice marina. Next, we'll start cruising the Black Warrior River to Mobile. It was interesting that we saw n boats on the rivers today at all, probably because it was very cold and windy. We just stayed inside and ran the generator and heaters so we were warm. I can't wait to get to Florida where it's nice for boating.

We passed the "White Cliffs of Epes" Alabama. They are very hard white clay cliffs, and rather pretty in the sunlight. Not exactly the white cliffs of Dover, but interesting nonetheless.





There were also a number of very large, inviting, sand beaches along the river. This one was probably about 2 miles long around a bend in the river.










Here's a shot of our GPS screen coming down to Demopolis. The dark black line is our "track" where the boat went and the arrow point at the end of it is our boat at the time I took this picture. While you can see we're heading generally South towards Demopolis, in the lower right hand corner of the screen, look at all the twists and turns in typical river travel routes. Now you know why "river miles" are so much more than "road miles" between any two places.

We decided to stay one day in Demopolis because tonight the temperature is going down to 22 degrees and tomorrow night is is forecast to be 21 degrees, so we prefer staying at a marina where we're plugged in to power and can run heaters at night. The next three days will be on the Black Warrior River and the Mobile River with no marinas and anchoring out, so we'd have to run the generator all night to run heaters and we'd be taking Daisy to shore in the dinghy at 22 degrees in the morning. It's supposed to be close to 30 Thursday night with daytime temps around 60, so we'll go ahead then. Staying here a day will also give me a chance to change the oil and oil filters on both of our diesel engines (5 gallons of oil in each!). It's nice that his marina has a used oil and oil filter recycling dropoff.