Hales Bar, TN to Scottsboro, AL

We went to bed on Saturday night to loud music and screaming from the Hales Bar Dam haunted house, and woke up the next morning to ducks and coots looking for food.

The entrance to Hales Bar Marina is a little tricky, and we had to call the harbor master for instructions when we came in. There is an old railroad bed that is submerged just below the surface, and only the shallowest of drafts can go directly over it. We took the safe route and went around, but it added almost two miles to our approach. Hales Bar also has some cool-looking floating cabins that we would love to visit someday on another adventure. 

We’re backtracking down the Tennessee River after leaving Chattanooga. It’s fun to see the same scenery from the opposite direction, and the 1 mph current is now in our favor. We had a 7-hour, 53-mile day on Sunday, with one lock (Nickajack), where we went down 40 feet instead of going up. 

We passed the Coca-Cola Stage, a converted barge that was used for many years at Chattanooga’s annual Riverbend Music Festival. The stage was severely damaged in 2020 when the tugboat moving it collided with the I-24 highway bridge.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has some pretty impressive projects, but nobody’s perfect. Below are the cooling towers from the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, AL. After 40 years and $4 billion, it never produced a single watt of power and remains unfinished. A private outfit offered to buy the site and complete the project, but the deal fell through, and the property sits idle.

We stopped at Goose Pond Colony Marina in Scottsboro, AL again, and scheduled another in-port day to do laundry and buy groceries. We couldn’t resist, and visited the Unclaimed Baggage Center to check it out. It’s basically a huge thrift store, with lost airline luggage, and their contents, for sale at a discount. There is also a small museum, with some of the strange, rare and valuable items that have come through their doors, including a diving helmet, bagpipes and a suit of armor.

We were invited over for drinks with Steve & Darci, Loopers we met in Chattanooga, then had dinner at The Docks restaurant, where I enjoyed their signature entree, shrimp and grits.