Scott here. October 28, 2023, we traveled from Fulton, MS to Columbus, MS or the Midway on the Tenn-Tom Marina to the Columbus Marina.

We traveled with 5 other boats yesterday plus us. Four stayed in the marina and two anchored near the marina. The four in the marina ate dinner at the local restaurant together and planned our travel day today together. All of us are looking to leave Demopolis, AL the morning of November 1 due to insurance limitations. I suspect we will be traveling most of the way to the Gulf together.

Plan v ACTUAL
Start at: 7:00 am ACTUAL 6:50 am
End at: 4:30 pm ACTUAL 4:18 pm
Total Time: 9.5 hours (6:38 travel time, plus 4 locks) ACTUAL 9:29 hours
Distance: 59.7 miles ACTUAL 60.8

Hmm, I thought we did better than our planning, but it looks like we were pretty darn close. I thought we did pretty good on the locks, but it seems it went according to plan. I kept track of three of the locks and they went like this:
Fulton Lock: 7:12 a-7:44 pm – 32 minutes
Wilkens Lock: 9:09 am-9:58 am – 47 minutes
Chocran Lock: 10:25 am-10:58 am – 33 minutes
Aberdeen Lock: 12:20 pm-1:22 pm – 62 minutes

But, I looked at the speed on my tracking and at 10:25 am my speed decreased to 5.4 mph because we had to wait for a barge to go down. Then at 10:59 I had a speed of 8.4 mph, so I can comfortably say that lock went from 10:25 to 10:58. I see my issue, I planned 1 hour for each lock, but counted 3 locks instead of 4! That mistake put our time right about where we were.

Now, understand the time is not an exact science. I have said before I usually start my tracking when I start the engines – so I don’t forget. We have a warm-up of 5-10 minutes before throwing the lines. Then we go idle speed to get into the channel. This time when we arrived at the marina we had to wait for a boat to finish fueling up to clear the way for us to put some liquid energy into MY Happiness. Then move over to the actual slip and tie up. That is when I turn off the tracking. But, I have that planned out as well.