Paducah, KY (October 11)

About an hour after I had given up on waiting and gone to bed, AMERICA took in her docking lines and started into the Kentucky Dam lock.  There was a lot of work being done on the other lock, putting it out of action, but I saw no indication that we had been waiting for upbound or downbound traffic.

We dropped down over 50 feet.

Looking up at tie-off points in the lock wall and
taken from the fifth deck of the riverboat. Before
we started, the top one was level with the first deck.

Note that the gates on the upriver side do not need
to extend all the way to the bottom of the lock. 

The Kentucky Dam is a significant producer of hydro-electric power.

It was worth getting up to watch, but I had to sacrifice a lot of sleep to do it.  Morning was going to come too early.

When it arrived, a cloudy sunrise gave way to rain with a breeze. We were approaching Paducah, KY.  I could feel the excitement within me building.  Paducah is home to the National Quilting Museum. Be still my heart. 

We headed out about 9:45, holding umbrellas at a 45° angle to block blown rain. 

The boat was again beached, so we disembarked from the bow and climbed a wide ramp to the Paducah flood wall.

Off to the left as we came through the wall was the River Discovery Center.  It was well-done and interesting. I had a chance to use a simulator to drive a towboat pushing barges at night going under a bridge.  I am pleased to report that the bridge remained intact after my turn at the control. 

Coming out of the River Discovery Center, we walked along looking at the flood wall murals depicting Paducah's history.

It is now time for me to eat some crow. The National Quilting Museum was great.

A day or two prior to arriving in Paducah, I had made a derogatory comment about the museum.  A friend we had made aboard - Nancy Nelson - mocked my preconceived idea. She was a quilter, so I was about to mentally write it off to being defensive, but she added that she had visited the museum before. She stated with confidence that what we would see was the antithesis of endless boring exhibits of grandma's patchwork quilt. She told me I would like it. She was so right.

made out of wood

Leaving the museum, we zig-zagged through the historic district of downtown Paducah. 

We visited the Lloyd Tilghman House and Civil War Museum. It was an  odd little museum with some interesting items.  

We continued on to the Paducah Railroad Museum, another odd one, again with some interesting items.  

Mikado locomotive 1518 - a 2-8-2

We decided to have lunch before returning to AMERICA and had a nice one at Shanties.

Coming out of the restaurant we had an unpleasant meteorological surprise. The temperature had dropped sharply and the wind speed increased.  The rain had returned as a fine, chilling mist. We decided that it was a good time to head back to the boat.

getting colder, causing mist to rise off the warmer water

We gathered outside AMERICA's bridge at 4:00 for a tour of it. The Captain-Navigator, former USCG Commander Johns, gave the tour. He was aboard to assist the Captain so that there was always a senior officer on deck when the boat was navigating the more challenging sections of the Ohio and Cumberland Rivers.  

The bridge was compact.  I was familiar with almost all the equipment other than the controls to the Azipod "Z" Drives.  The helm was manned and one drive engaged to hold the boat steady against the ramp given the combination of wind and current.

Mr. Johns explained (as previously mentioned in this blog) that although big enough to be considered a small ship, AMERICA was called a boat because it stayed in protected inland waters. The need to stay in protected waters made sense given AMERICA's dimensions and a draft of only 8 feet.

Mr. Johns also told us various statistics (supplemented by some from Wikipedia) about tows.  

• A typical barge carries 1500 tons of cargo, which is 15 times greater than a rail car and 60 times greater than one trailer truck. 
• An average river tow on the upper Mississippi River is 15 barges consisting of 5 barges tied together and moving 3 abreast. 
• On the lower Mississippi a tow going with the current can be as many as 42 barges (7 x 6) carrying the equivalent of more than 2,500 trailer trucks. The whole tow, excluding the towboat, can be over 1,200 feet long and 200 feet wide, covering over 6 acres. A tow going against the current is limited to 40 barges.  
• The larger "line-haul" (long distance) towboats used to push (they never pull) a tow can generate over 11,000 horsepower.  

pulling away from Paducah

Shortly after we got underway at 5:30, the captain came on the PA system and announced that due to high water on the Mississippi, we would be going to Cape Girardeau, MO (on the Mississippi) and spending an unscheduled night there before turning downriver and proceeding directly to Memphis. This deleted from the itinerary two more stops, one of 2-days in Saint Louis, MO, and the other a day in New Madrid, MO. Groan!

Cumberland River (October 10)

Our route today would take us off the Ohio River.  We would proceed up the Cumberland River to Dover, TN, then back down the Cumberland and through a channel that connected the Cumberland to the Tennessee River. After a short time on the Tennessee we would reconnect with the Ohio.

Blue = down Ohio and up Cumberland Rivers
Purple = down Cumberland, Tennessee and Ohio Rivers
Red circle = channel between Cumberland and Tennessee

Before dawn, we passed through the Barkley Lock upbound, a 54-foot lift.

We spent the morning cruising the river watching wildlife. The shore was often close in on both sides.  Navigation was tricky due to sandbars. We saw bald eagles, pelicans, turkey vultures and a wide variety of other birds including herons.

There were also some interesting trees.

My admiration for the skill of towboat captains went up another notch during the morning.  AMERICA was overtaking a tow. There was not enough room in the channel.  The towboat captain nudged the tow into a riverbank, keeping the right front edge of the tow against the shore while we passed it.  The towboat captain then backed the tow off the shore, worked it back into the channel and continued upriver.  

A while later my admiration took a small tick downward when AMERICA had to give an oncoming tow five blasts so that it would indicate its intentions.

We continued up this beautiful, sparsely populated river until we arrived at Dover and Fort Donelson, the site of a pivotal Civil War battle.

In the 1800's the major rivers were the equivalent of today's superhighways. Upriver of Fort Donelson was Nashville, an important Confederate transportation hub.  If the Union could seize control Fort Donelson, it could cripple Nashville, dealing a serious blow to Confederacy logistics.  

The earthworks fort was mostly overgrown as was the surrounding countryside so envisioning what had taken place required considerable imagination. For the same reason, it did not offer many photo opportunities.  

The initial assault by six gunboats did not work out to well for the Union forces.  From the cannon emplacements, the Confederates effectively pounded the approaching gunboats.  The batteries had previously ranged the cannons using landmarks along the shore.  This enabled them to skip the cannonballs on the water so that they slammed into a gunboat's hull below its armor.

After a stupendous blunder by the politically appointed and militarily inept commanding officer who fled prior to a bloody battle, the fort fell to a land assault.  

Dover Hotel where the fort was surrendered.  Its loss changed
the course of the Civil War in the entire theater.

In the absence of landmarks and structures to support his narrative, our guide did a good job of setting the stage for the battle and describing how it unfolded.  It was an interesting tour.

Returning to AMERICA, as sunset approached, we cruised downriver.

Well after dark, we passed the Kentucky State Penitentiary, nicknamed "Castle on the Cumberland".  (We had passed it upbound, but I missed it).  The bridge crew of AMERICA worked the riverboat to and through Barkley Channel (circled in red on the chart near the beginning of this post). The channel connects the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. 

Both of AMERICA's spotlights searching for channel markers

Barkley Channel

Once in the Tennessee, I could immediately see the Kentucky Dam.  We would pass through its lock to drop down to the level of the Ohio River. It was close to midnight, but I stayed up to watch AMERICA go through the lock.

We entered the channel leading up to the lock. After backing and filling for a while, in a stiff wind the captain worked AMERICA alongside the jetty. The crew put out some docking lines.  

There we sat.  I eventually gave up and went to bed.

Henderson, KY (October 09)

We set our clocks back one hour during the night. 

Pam & I awoke at about 6 o'clock as we went through a lock. I stepped out of our cabin onto our terrace in my pajamas and bare feet. Yikes! It was an invigorating 45ﾟ outside under clear skies.

By 7:30, we were passing Evansville, Indiana in the Southwest corner of the state, rounding a 180ﾟ bend in the river on route to Henderson, KY.

Henderson (circled) is in the lower right-hand corner 

Departing AMERICA, we climbed an impressively large U-shaped launching ramp both in its breadth and height. 

Numbers in the centerline indicated the height

of the ramp above normal water level. 

At the top of the ramp was a statue of Admiral Husband E. Kimmel. Born in Henderson, he was the commanding officer when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Disgraced in the wake of the attack, in 1999, he was posthumously exonerated.

Henderson was the birthplace of W.C. Handy who dubbed himself "Father of the Blues" and was certainly a major influence in that music style.

A more widely known, long-time resident of Henderson was John James Audubon, the famous American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. It was suggested that we walk around the town looking at bronze sculptures created by Raymond Graf from Audubon's "Birds of America". We were assured that after we did that, we would still have time to catch a shuttle bus out to the Audubon Museum and Nature Center. 

John James Audubon 

The walk with one of the lecturers took us by several of the sculptures. I don't know how many sculptures are scattered around the downtown area, but the spacing between the ones we saw suggests either Henderson is bigger than I thought or there are not exactly a whole bunch of them.

Along the way we visited the Carnegie-built library which had some personality.

Pam & I hoofed it back to the shuttle bus stop to catch a ride out to the museum. We saw the bus departing as we got close, turning onto another street before we could flag it down. We waited and waited for it to come back, but it never did. We learned later that the driver had been given a schedule that suspended the shuttle for a while in the middle of the morning. It was to be yet another in a continuing series of miscommunications with the ACL tour director.

Having seen a number of Audubon's works over the years, we decided not to find a way to get to the reportedly modest-sized museum. Instead, we opted to use the time to go to the local drug store for a few things. We had been told it would be the closest one in any port.

Purchases in hand, we walked a few side streets at the north end of town admiring some of the houses.

We returned aboard and continued downriver.

We came to the John T. Myers Locks and Dam. 

While we were transiting through the 1200' lock, an up-bound tow was transiting the 600-foot lock. The size of the "tow" (the combination of barges and towboat) required it to be broken in half, the first half being raised and pulled out while the second half waited its turn.

As the day ended, we were proceeding to the mouth of the Cumberland River, where we would leave the Ohio, going upriver for a port call in Dover, Tennessee tomorrow.

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Down (arrow) on Ohio River, then up (arrow) on Cumberland River