We made it to salt water! We're in Mobile, AL at Dog River Marina after 3 days on the rivers by ourselves with no marinas and seeing almost no other boats except a dozen big barges, a few bass boats and a few cruisers. The rivers are almost empty and, of course, cold. The day we spent in Demopolis started with a crunching sound, as we slept, at 6 AM. I got up, put some clothes on and went up to see a sailboat names Island Time leaving the docks past our boat. He had been docked right in front of us and when he left he scraped something on his boat against our anchor, because it sticks out in front of our bow and he had miscalculated his docking abilities. I only knew this because I found a 1 inch flap of blue paint stuck to my anchor. No damage to our boat, but I thought he should have stopped to investigate or say he's sorry.

The first night after Demopolis, AL we anchored Bashi Creek, which is a very nice anchorage with a park and boat launch. When we got there we found that sailboat Island Time anchored in the creek also! It turns out that his motor burned up 4 miles from Bashi Creek, which is 70 miiles from anywhere that can service a boat! The only other cruiser on the river that day had towed him the 4 miles to Bashi Creek. I felt so bad about his predicament that I was very friendly about his hitting our anchor. It turned out that the paint scraped off of his dinghy outboard motor. The Demopolis Marina had agreed to send a towboat down with 2 crew the next day, drive a car down to oick them up and bring a new crew to tow him back to Demopolis to fix his engine. Yikes! I can't even imagine how much that's going to cost him. When we took Daisy to the boat launch that night, our dinghy motor starter wouldn't work, so we paddled the dinghy with Daisy then and the next night and two mornings.

Luckily, we were able to anchor close to a boat ramp last night too, so we didn't have far to paddle the dinghy to get Daisy to shore 3 times. It was at an old, abandoned lock named "Lock One Cutoff". There was a very nice park there, great for walking dogs. That made for a longer, 110 mile, trip today but we got an early start and arrived at the marina by 4 PM.

When we got to the Coffeeville lock, the Delta Queen riverboat was just finishing locking up as we waited to lock down. The Delta Queen was one of the last real stern wheeler riverboats carrying passengers on river cruises. The Coast Guard refused to renew it's commercial license last year due to fire hazard of the wood superstructure, so it is being decommissioned. This is the last trip steaming up the rivers for this grand old lady, and with no passengers.










Then, when you get to Mobile, the river is full of boats, people working on the docks and big boats, streets with traffic streaming along.... stuff like we haven't seen for 3 days. Mobile is very interesting to cruise through because it's a very large, busy port with big oceangoing ships, huge docks, etc. We were passed in the shipping channel by this HUGE container ship.

Then we passed this huge Navy tri-maran fast boat. For size comparison, there's a pickup truck on the dock in front of the boat.









I went over and got shrimp off the shrimp boats this evening and grilled them for dinner. It's more hassle to remove their heads, etc. but they're very sweet and yummy. We'll be in Mobile 3 days or so, at least until we get the dinghy motor starter fixed.