Why The Tennessee River?

Why the Tennessee River and not some other river? That's easy. I live in Chattanooga, the river city. I have hiked along the banks of the river. I have canoed the Tennessee River Blueway, a fifty mile stretch of the river from the Chickamauga Dam to the Nickajack Dam through the Tennessee River Gorge. I have been involved in River Rescue and other river related organizations for years. It's a natural for me to be interested in the Tennessee River.

Check out my trip down the Blueway on my website CanoeTennessee.com. Now that I'm retarded, I mean retired, and have the time to finally get the job done. I have been talking about and planning this trip for years.

Also I am a touring paddler and not a white water paddler. The Tennessee River is really just a long skinny linear lake because of the 11 dams along the river. Who knows. If I have fun on the Tennessee River, perhaps the Cumberland River will be next.

This journey will be 652 miles, 11 locks and 1,144,000 paddle strokes in about 6 weeks.

Getting Ready

The Tennessee River is 652 miles long. The river starts in Knoxville, TN, flows through Alabama, along the state line of Mississippi, up through Tennessee again and terminates into the Ohio River in Paducah, Kentucky. There are many state parks and private campgrounds and marinas along the way, but there are also many long stretches of wilderness river with few or no portage opportunities. My plans are to live on the river full time, day and night if I need to.

To accomplish that, I have a Cot Tent that I can lay down flat on my canoe during the day and deploy up into a tent during the night. OK...OK...I know what you are thinking...won't that make the canoe top heavy and this guy will roll the canoe over! Ordinarily yes, but I will be using retractable stabilizers to prevent the canoe from rolling.

The stabilizers built by Kay-Noe will be retracted up during the day for traveling and deployed down during the night for sleeping in the Cot Tent. Check back here often as I plan and prepare for my journey. I will be launching my trip on September 6.

First Step Completed

Well, the all essential first step is completed...I bought a canoe. It's an old Grumman canoe like maybe out of the 60's or 70's that I found on Craig's List. (I'll research the exact birth date in a few days.) Locating this canoe was desireable and important to me because it is the real deal. Grumman manufactured airplanes for the US government during WW II. After the war Grumman had lots of raw materials laying around the yard and no more orders for airplanes, so they started building canoes from their residual stock. This was the good stuff. This was the stuff they used to make airplanes and that is what I wanted. 

Grumman has evolved through some changes over the decades and they still make a great canoe, but I feel good about having one of the originals. Even the Grummon logo is painted on. How often do you see that anymore?

The original owner was an older man who bought the canoe new for $1200 (a lot of money for a canoe back then) for his grandchildren when they came to visit. Well the grandchildren came to visit year after year but they never even got the canoe wet one time. The man needed some quick cash one day and sold the canoe to the second owner, a good friend of his.

The second owner had been canoeing a northern New York river each fall since about 1960 but this canoe never made it to the river. It has been sitting in his barn for many years just waiting for me to come by and put it to good use. Even though I am the third owner, I sort of feel like the original owner because the canoe has been sitting idle for decades just waiting to be used for a special event.

My plans are to polish this canoe to a mirror shine and spray on a coat of pickup bed liner on the interior of the canoe to help protect it. I'll be starting that project in a couple of days.