We’re at Aberdeen Marina in Aberdeen, MS tonight, after an easy cruising day with beautiful, warm, sunny weather. It got up to 78 degrees this afternoon. This is the first day in a long time that we have run the boat from our flybridge, which, except for a bimini sunshade, is open to the weather.
The entrance to the Aberdeen Marina is an unnerving, twisting and turning narrow channel through a cypress swamp. The water on either side of the channel is obviously one to two feet deep and full of logs and cypress knees, with only the thin red and green channel marker poles to mark it. While I would call it an extremely well marked channel, it’s still creepy to go through. In the picture shown, the channel goes straight back towards the grassy shore and there are 3 red and 3 green thin marker poles visible.
The marina itself is small but very nice and they have a free courtesy car for transient boaters to drive into town. The courtesy car is a huge 1980’s white Lincoln Town Car…. A veritable land yacht. Not everything on the car works, but it’s free and it got us there and back. I believe we could have seated four people across on that front bench seat. We went to the Big Star market to buy a few groceries.
The locks on the Ten-Tom have been really great compared to what we’re used to in Illinois. We usually count on an average one hour wait at locks before we can get in. We have waited up to 4 ½ hours for locks and once averaged 4 hours per lock on a 2 day trip through 4 locks. On the Ten-Tom, we have usually either gone right in when we got there or have waited a matter or 5 to 10 minutes. At the locks today, two were zero wait and one was 55 minutes. Yesterday all three locks we did were zero wait. We also really like using the floating bollards at the locks, which they always let you do here. They are very large heavy floating drums in a sealed channel at the side of the lock. They have huge cleats to tie your boat to so when the water goes up or down, your boat just follows it easily. Instead of 2 people holding on to ropes dropped from the top of the lock at the bow and stern of the boat. The “floaters” are much easier.
The entrance to the Aberdeen Marina is an unnerving, twisting and turning narrow channel through a cypress swamp. The water on either side of the channel is obviously one to two feet deep and full of logs and cypress knees, with only the thin red and green channel marker poles to mark it. While I would call it an extremely well marked channel, it’s still creepy to go through. In the picture shown, the channel goes straight back towards the grassy shore and there are 3 red and 3 green thin marker poles visible.
The marina itself is small but very nice and they have a free courtesy car for transient boaters to drive into town. The courtesy car is a huge 1980’s white Lincoln Town Car…. A veritable land yacht. Not everything on the car works, but it’s free and it got us there and back. I believe we could have seated four people across on that front bench seat. We went to the Big Star market to buy a few groceries.
The locks on the Ten-Tom have been really great compared to what we’re used to in Illinois. We usually count on an average one hour wait at locks before we can get in. We have waited up to 4 ½ hours for locks and once averaged 4 hours per lock on a 2 day trip through 4 locks. On the Ten-Tom, we have usually either gone right in when we got there or have waited a matter or 5 to 10 minutes. At the locks today, two were zero wait and one was 55 minutes. Yesterday all three locks we did were zero wait. We also really like using the floating bollards at the locks, which they always let you do here. They are very large heavy floating drums in a sealed channel at the side of the lock. They have huge cleats to tie your boat to so when the water goes up or down, your boat just follows it easily. Instead of 2 people holding on to ropes dropped from the top of the lock at the bow and stern of the boat. The “floaters” are much easier.
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