Here in the land of locks and barges, we'd been operating with a chart book put out by the US Army Corps of Engineers called The Lower Black Warrior-Tombigbee Waterway. It has much less detail than a regular navigational chart, but it's all you really need for the river. Sometimes mile markers in the trees are a long way apart, so you just have to go by the curves and bends they drew on the map and try to match them to the shape of the river. We were on the lookout for wildlife but never spotted much other than shore birds. Tom spotted one flock of birds gathered on the bank that was out of the ordinary and we'd never seen before so I tried to identify them from my Audubon book. The closest ID I could make by their size, shape and color was that they were young wild turkeys.  

Inside the Demopolis lock, another breed of bird entertained us while we rode up the wall. There must have been 18 to 20 great egrets lined up atop the wall, waiting for the incoming water to begin churning and bringing small fish to the surface. A bird would spot a fish and swoop down, pluck it out of the water, and then gracefully flap its wings and return to the wall holding a silver, wiggly tidbit in its beak. There it swallowed its fish dinner. They swooped and plucked, sometimes ten or more at once, the entire time it took to rise 30 feet to the top. Those egrets knew a good thing when they saw it and they had it down to a science.  

It was time to fuel up again and we stopped for the night at the marina in Demopolis where diesel cost a staggering $4.89/gallon. It was almost six o'clock so we spent the night there at the fuel dock and plugged in for a refreshing night in air conditioning. 

In the cool air of dawn, before the sun reached the treetops, steam rose from the warm river water, creating a calm, ethereal effect. Along the shore mimosa trees, sometimes called silk trees, blossomed, filling the air with a sweet fragrance. It was the best time of day.

Monday night we stopped at a bend in the river just north of the Tom Bevill Lock. The first place we thought about dropping anchor, on the west side, way way too shallow, so we attempted the horseshoe bend on the east side. That was deep, around 20 feet in most places. Tom maneuvered around and found a 10-foot-deep spot in the still water, put it in neutral, went forward to drop the anchor. We drifted ever so slightly, but the depth gauge jumped erratically, ranging from 6 feet to 20 feet deep with barely any movement. He let the anchor fall anyway, but pulled it back up again when the depth continued to fluctuate radically as we swung. Most likely there were fallen trees or stumps at the bottom. A little distance away we located a level bottom and dropped anchor again. Tom put out a trip line (an empty bleach bottle attached to a yellow nylon line) to buoy the anchor in case it became tangled in something, like an uprooted tree. We were in a wide expanse of the river, more like a small lake, in a peaceful and idyllic setting, where ribbons of pink and purple streaked the sky. Peaceful, that is, until Bozo in his bass boat came by full-throttle within a few feet feet of us and ran over the trip line, sending it under the boat to get caught on who-knows-what. Tom climbed out onto the swim platform and tried to sway the boat over with an oar far enough to see where it went. It didn't work. He said, "You better get your suit on," meaning I'd have to jump in that muddy river in the dim twilight, swim under the boat, and look for it. I was not happy but until it came out from under the boat, we weren't going anywhere. Dangling ropes and spinning propellers don't mix. Then he thought of a better solution: haul up the anchor, lift it all the way up over the bow rail so the trip line would come up with it (providing it wasn't already tangled in a tree or something), and then undo the line. It worked. It wasn't as easy as it sounds, but he got the line in and took it off the anchor. A couple of pails full of river water rinsed off the blobs of mud that had splattered the bow (and us) during all that anchor hauling. Now the mosquitoes were coming out for their evening feast of blood in the still, muggy air. We hadn't needed to go in the water to get wet - with all that activity, we'd had sweat baths. 

Our tenth lock of this trip was the John Rankin Lock, the last one for the day on Tuesday. All locks on the Tenn-Tom have what they call floating pins, where you loop a line around a bollard, secure it to a cleat on the boat, and the whole contraption floats up the water, along with you and your boat. It's easy but I 'd always stand nearby just in case one might stick and not move up (or down) the way it should. Getting pulled out of the water and dangling by a cleat could make for a bad day! Most of the time the moving machinery parts make a low, echo-y, bassoon-like sound as they move along but the one we were tied to at the Rankin Lock screeched and squealed the whole way up. I had to hold my ears. 

Just north of the lock would be our final anchorage before we made it all the way to Florence. The temperature and humidity were the same as they'd been every day by late afternoon - too hot to move. Tom scooped up a bucket of river water to dump over his parched body and said, "Look, this water is clear." I looked and it was, not like the brown-tinted stuff we'd been seeing. That did it. I slid in off the swim platform into the relatively cool water. It was warmer than average swimming pool water, maybe in the upper 80s, but it felt great.    

There had been virtually no traffic on the river all the way from Mobile except for barges. The only radio transmissions were from us to the lock operators or from us to approaching tows asking, "Where do you want me, Cap, one whistle or two?" Most of the time it was just us, water, trees and sky. We had no cell phone signal, no internet connection, no TV, radio or newspapers. The world could have been collapsing around us and we wouldn't have known. 

By the time we got to Pickwick Lake on the Alabama/Mississippi border, we were "in the neighborhood" of Florence, and when we turned toward the east into the broad Tennessee River, Tom's anticipation of 'getting there' was high. He said, "Once you get close, it always seems to take forever." But it didn't take forever, only until 5:23 p.m., when I shut down the engine in the Florence Harbor Marina. We'd made it without any more mishaps. That night I couldn't help reminiscing about one day five and a half years ago when Pura Vida pulled away from the dock in Dunedin for her first adventure, a trek around the great loop. Anticipation was even higher that day than Tom's was today, and with good reason. Now we'd come full circle. The cruising chapter has ended and it's time to start a new page. All we have to do now is decide what the next chapter will be.