#11
While we were coming down the Miss. & staying in Memphis, it was raining cats & dogs in the upper Arkansas River drainage system. By the time we arrived @ the mouth of the Arkansas, it was a mess of debris. Man made & natural, it seemed there was everything imaginable to dodge.
Giant trees. Green leaved limbs acting as flags & 1/2 submerged wooden "things" gave us the most concern. The fact that I was down to 1 prop was the main worry. We "thump-bump, bumped for several miles before the "stuff" began to find its way over to the banks. It was impossible to miss it all. Going to neutral became quite common.
It bears repeating that a GPS system is necessary to find specific areas on the Mississippi. We never actually saw the mouth of the Arkansas (except on the monitor). We were given a hint of where the inlet @ Greenville, Miss. was because we watched a tow disappear against the far bank. There one minute, gone the next.
Sure enough, the chart showed Greenville. We turned to port.
The entrance was busy. Before you can get up to the marina/casino complex, you have to rub elbows with the many industrial sites on both sides of the channel. Unlike Paducah, we received many waves & hellos (none of them the 3 finger kind). We picked our way ( not really that difficult) up stream to the fuel docks. The girls walked up to the casino. The prices were the best we encountered. It was well worth the 3hrs off our day.
We bade Greenville good by, the 2+ mile long floating dredge discharge pipe was spewing out sand @ the mouth of the inlet. It was carrying mud & water from a site being dredged way up in the canal. Long lengths of 8" pipe on floats in a crazy zig zag route out to the Mississippi. Impressive! As the sound dimmed, we started planning our last night on Big Muddy.
Tomorrow we would go through the last true lock of the trip. Old River Lock was just below Natchez.
|