Cruising Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake is more like the boating we're used to.
Even though there is Tennessee River current here, and it flows against the direction we're traveling, it doesn't affect the boat like the other rivers did. We stayed at Kennlake State Resort Park Marina for 1 night. We enjoyed it so much-like anchoring out but with the security of being tied to a dock (not to mention being able to run the air conditioner without firing up the generator) that we looked for another state park marina for our next stop and found Paris Landing State Park marina just over the Tennessee Border. We understand these parks are at capacity during the summer but quiet right down when the kids go back to school. As we entered the breakwall, we had a surprise, Paris Landing Coast Guard Station, with its big buoy tender, Cimarron and all the buoys stacked on shore The coast guard shares this site with the Tennessee Valley Authority Police.
See how peaceful it is here, with the serenity and natural beauty?
You'd never guess there's a major highway 1/4 mile in front of us! We had a nice long walk at Kennlake and a good bike ride here. We stopped to look at the hotel and restaurant and rode directly back to the boat to request a ride to the restaurant for their lunch buffet. Gotta love that fried okra and catfish and hush puppies!
We had a nice visit with Monica and Curt from Sweden aboard their sailboat Horison. They shipped their boat to Baltimore and have been doing the loop in segments for 3 years. They were next to us for a short time in Grafton, but their masts were down so they could cruise under the bridges on the way here. The masts are up now for the rest of the trip.
The Cimarron left home port to work on buoys:
We took a walk and saw lots of ducks, most of them looked familiar, but these intrigued us:
We went back to the boat and on-line to identify them, but couldn't find anything resembling them. John finally went up to the store to ask a ranger. They are some kind of Chinese ducks that are evidently released pets. No wonder we couldn't find them under "Tennessee ducks"!
This park has the most unusual picnic pavilion we've ever seen. When the new bridge was built, and dedicated to someone else, it was decided to place one span of the old Scott Fitzhugh bridge in the state park.
It's hard to imagine that during the Civil War, there were no lakes here. The dams were constructed in the 30's and in the 50's to help control flooding on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Whole communities were relocated and their homes, stores, farms now lie underwater. In 1963, President Kennedy named the "Land Between the Lakes" a national recreation area.
Rain threatened all day, and we watched lightning bolts and flashes north and west of us until the skies opened up right above us and the wind blew and wow! what a storm! We watched it for a while then Mary went into the cabin to read while John stayed up on deck to move towels around to catch the drips we get when it rains this hard and see if we needed to move to a building on land for shelter. The storm slackened after about 40 minutes, but residual winds blew well into Thursday, delaying our planned departure. The wind was blowing hard enough that it formed white caps on the 3 mile wide lake and tugged the buoys the opposite way from the way the current runs:
When we came into this marina, the water in the basin looked like the water on the lake. Today there is a noticeable difference:
Glad we're in the blue calm instead of the angry brown!
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