Day 25: Clifton, TN, to Grand Harbor, MS, United States

Americas Great Loop Traveler
Show trip
Add to bucket listRemove from bucket list
Share
Day 197
Monday, October 27, 2025 at 10:30 AM
🌧 11 °C
Altitude: 319 m
United States Atlanta 33.7485, -84.387133°44’55” N 84°23’14” W
1 1 1 1 1
Day 25: Clifton, TN, to Grand Harbor, MS
October 27 in the United States ⋅ 🌧 11 °C
Our departure from Clifton is under leaden skies at 0745, but totally calm and the temp around 15C. It rained overnight and more is forecast for today, but we're not a sailboat and we'd rather have precip than puff.

I'm thinking about the comparison between our beautiful weather conditions here and those of the last week in Otago and Southland in New Zealand, where a gale-force storm has blacked out the entire region and caused wind-driven havoc. We hope folks have a generator, a good fuel supply for the BBQ, and plenty of candles. Hundreds of power poles are down and lots of comms are out. Here's hoping for the most expedited restoration of power possible.

We cruise south on a mirror-calm Tennessee River with little to do by gaze at the passing riverside residences and pass a couple of barge tows, one downbound and one upbound. At Pittsburgh Landing we encounter the Civil War battleground of Shiloh. Oops... I must apologise to our captain for a momentary gaffe; the 'War of Northern Aggression', I should have said.

The weather is holding and the river is glassy. We negotiate the Pickwick Lock up into Pickwick Lake, and make for Grand Harbor. A friend of Prestons arrives at the dock with the replacement glass jug for the coffee maker (that I broke in the sink a week ago) and takes us into the village for a few necessaries. I'll cook lamb chops upstairs on the grill tonight, and Rosie will do fried onions, smashed spuds and brussel sprouts.Read more
Traveler Departing Pickwick Lock... our last major lift for the trip. It's all downhill from here to Lake Okeechobee in Florida.
10/27/25Reply
Traveler I shot this with my iPhone looking through a binocular eyepiece. This poor heron has something stuck in its beak--possibly a fishing hook and maybe some line--which it tries to remove by rubbing it itself with a preening motion. As far as we could tell, it wasn't successful.
10/27/25Reply
Traveler The Tennessee River is utterly epic! Its main navigable channel is 652 miles long. The navigation pool created by Kentucky Dam (where we joined the river near Paducah), which includes Kentucky Lake, extends about 184.4 miles all the way to the Pickwick Landing Dam. From the Pickwick Dam, the river is navigable for a further 468 miles through Chattanooga to just beyond Knoxville, TN. But we're not going there. We turn off Pickwick Lake and into Yellow Creek, to access the Grand Harbor Marina for the night. This is the beginning of the next sector of our journey... the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway (colloquially known as the 'Tenn-Tom'), a partly man-made waterway that connects the Tennessee River here at Grand Harbor, with the Tombigbee River on which we'll run down to Mobile, AL, [say 'Mobeele'] on the Gulf (of Mexico!). This section involves navigating a series of 10 locks and dams to move between water levels. The "Divide Cut," a 29-mile canal, connects the Tennessee River and Tombigbee River watersheds. After the Tenn-Tom, we'll follow the Tombigbee and Mobile rivers south, leading directly into Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
10/27/25Reply
2 more comments
1 like