If he said it once, he said

it a dozen times during the ten weeks we spent on the Tennessee River

and its tributaries in the spring and fall of 2000: "All those years

I was driving 300 miles south to sail when this was only 200 miles north!"

Since 1971, Dave had moved

his boat farther and farther south to sail the bays and the Gulf off Pensacola

and Panama City. He loved it, but was frustrated by distance and the cost

of marinas and salt-water maintenance.

Now the skipper of a small

trawler and no longer restricted by mast height and keel depth, he has

discovered the broad, eminently sail-able lakes formed by the dams on

the Tennessee system.

River-boating is not without

its challenges. One evening on the Clinch, a tributary to the Tennessee,

I sat in the bow watching twilight lower, and realized that what was lowering

was the river. A mud beach appeared where trees had been dragging branches

in the water a half hour before. A stob I thought was a turtle rose out

of the water and showed itself to be the top of a post.

I made mental notes of how

near the edge I was seeing logs, to compare with later observations. It

didn't seem to be worsening, so I let Dave continue his nap. The last

depth I had called out to him as we were anchoring was six feet-six inches.

That meant we could afford to lose almost five more feet before the boat

would hit bottom.

Earlier, when we went in to

bathe, we discovered that the current was very swift. Hadn't seemed so,

motoring upstream, but we put the ladder over the side and nearly lost

it as Dave hung onto it while washing. For safety, we tied one of the

white fenders to the gunwale and also dropped overboard a 25-foot line

cleated to the stern.

It took a while before we could

lower all our, er, sensitive parts into the river. (Why did the words

"death's cold, sullen stream" come to mind?) It was a formidable

current. Dave's a much stronger swimmer than I, and even he did not dare

let loose the rope.

When it was my turn, I held

fast to the line and let the water carry me flat out behind the boat.

It felt as though the boat was no longer anchored, but speeding up river.

Yet now the water around us was turgid, and still dropping.

When I heard Dave stir, I told

him what I'd observed. He checked the instruments and found we now had

only four feet-seven inches beneath us. We debated moving farther out

into the river, but it was nearly dark and that seemed risky too. So we

set the depth sounder and went to bed.

When we got up in the night,

the boat rocked underfoot, telling us it was still afloat, and in the

morning, with the gauge reading 5.2 feet, we had water aplenty to start

our day's cruise.

Apparently, the swift current

and loss of water were caused by their letting water out at Watt's Bar

dam, about 50 miles downstream on the Tennessee, drawing down the rest

of the system. The river required at least a day to come