Clarksville to Nashville: Flotilla in the Mist

Okay, we didn’t have a flotilla, but it sounded funny.

We planned to leave at dawn again to make the 60ish mile trip to Nashville. We had one lock, the Cheatham Lock, and the nice folks we met at the dock the night before said that they had to wait three hours. It’s a smaller lock and they sometimes have to break down the barges and reassemble them on the other side.

When it was time to go, however, we couldn’t see the other side of the marina. A thick fog had set in. Fortunately, it lifted about half an hour later and we set out at 0700.

The Cheatham lock is about 21.5 miles upriver from Clarksville. Once we were underway, I called the lock master to see what the traffic looked like. He said that they had even closed since midnight for fog. There was one tow up river, one down river, and one in the lock. Oh boy…

By the time we got to the lock, the fog had lifted and the tows had almost cleared. As we approached, the last tow was pulling out to go down river and we went right in behind them. After waiting a few minutes for a house boat to lock through with us, we went up 27 feet and on our way.

The rest of the cruise was beautiful. For about half of the trip the river was empty and quiet. For the other half, there was quite a bit of leisure traffic with it picking up as we got closer to Nashville.

Coming into Nashville was really neat. We sailed past downtown and spied the empty Municipal dock in the right descending bank. The dock is really low, so Wendy set about putting our fenders right.

As we came under the pedestrian bridge, a tow came the other way and called us on 16. We scooted to the one whistle at his request as he passed. Once passed, we turned around and went back to dock on our port side. Unfortunately, the power pedestal we chose was dead, so we moved to the other side of the dock.

We cleaned up, walked over the pedestrian bridge to downtown, strolled around a bit, had a drink at John Rich’s Redneck Riviera and then headed to dinner at Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honkey Tonk Rock N Roll Steakhouse.