So how was Kentucky Lake

We have been poking around Kentucky Lake  for most of a week now.  We stayed at LightHouseLanding the first two nights.  It is a very nice marina entirely sailboats; they sell both Hunter and Beneteau and their clientele appears to be surviving pretty well. There are quite a few Hunters in the 41 foot range that appear to be quite new, and there are many new Beneteaus including 34-42 footers.  They also have cottages and rv sites for rent.  The service department seems ok and they are going to help us unstep the mast.  Even with such a large number of Diesel Sailboats, they don't sell fuel and the little oil that they had in their ship's store was for gasoline engines. 

I did an oil change and transmission fluid change and everything looked good, they disposed of the used oil without charge.  I ordered replacements for the water pump impeller and had them shipped to me at the Marina.  I spent parts of two days mucking out the engine room.  It was recommended to me to used Soy Sock bilge absorbers to keep from polluting the water by absorbing and digesting any hydrocarbon based fluid in the bilges.  Unfortunately, the soy material breaks down into a really ugly gelatin-like substance that makes a real mess of the engine room.  Yuk.

The Lake is 180 miles long and takes up a great deal of the Tennessee River down to Pickwick Lock and Dam whic is the start of the Tenn Tom waterway.  The lake reminds me of Lake Pepin quite a bit --not too deep, pretty wide and LONG.  The thing that makes it nicer than Pepin is that there are a large number of side bays that you can poke around in.  We went down to Pisgah Bay about 6 miles south of Lighthouse Landing.  It was fairly large and surrounded by state and federal parks with campgrounds. 

There was quite a bit of fishing both from shore and in bass boats in the bay.  Water temp here is still pretty near 80 degrees most places so we enjoyed a nice swim in clean water.  We were anchored in 18 ft.  Max got to go to shore multiple times and Liz walked through the woods with him.  She was trying to get into a cemetary asociated with one of the few towns that was flooded by the creation of the lake.  Unfortunately, it was fenced with barb wire, one assumes there had been some vandalism.  There was some graffiti on some of the rock faces surrounding the lake but not too bad.

The guide books said that this bay was good holding ground for anchoring and there was a pretty strong cold front/thunderstorm predicted.  We kept having the anchor alarm go off but did not seem to have moved much, but it was certainly enough to disturb our sleep.  Anyway, the cold front brought pretty Fall-like weather with lows in the forties and blustery winds.  We decided to try one of the other Marina's. 

This one is called Kentucky Dam Marina and is run as a State Park.  The facility is pretty nice, lots of both Power and Sail boats, gas and diesel.  We had some communication troubles talking with them about how to safely reach the entry channel and where to go inside the marina which was frustrating but once we got in they turned out to be nice people just not very good communicators.  They helped us dock and tie up at the fuel dock.  When it was time to move to our rental slip, a common problem that we have found at powerboat oriented marinas recurred.  The slip had plenty of water depth, but since it was built with powerboats in mind it had a crossbar across the front of the slip at 5 ft.  So we unexplainably could not get more than half the boat into the slip.  After we asked they admitted that the crossbar was there, but they thought it was at 6 ft.  So they moved us to the end of the pier.  We pulled in right in front of a Kady Krogen Trawler that must be 55 ft, feels like our cockpit is sitting underneath their bow sprit but we have had no problems\.

The Marina had a courtesy car/van which we used for free to get groceries, oil, and propane.  We also stopped at a couple of roadside stands to get some vegatables since the produce in the local IGA food stores basically sucked: old and shrivelled and not very much variety.  But it was nice to not to have to rent a car or pay big taxi fees.

It is sort of amazing, but none of the literature about this place mentions that it is entirely surrounded by "Dry Counties".  No booze whatsoever for 40 miles.  We went to Patti's 1880's settlement the local restaurant and said we were just there for cocktails and appetizers.  The hostess said sorry its a dry county, Liz asked how about beer, "No, it's a dry county" was the response. Anyway we went back to the boat and made our own drinks.

IT has been very nice to be off the big rivers out of the current and in such pleasant surroundings and poking around instead of getting up at the crack of dawn to make another 60 miles.

Liz will comment further.

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Later....