When we left Paducah we had two routes to choose from. The shorter route goes through Kentucky Lock and the somewhat longer goes through the Cumberland River and the Barkley Lock. All along I had planned to go through Barkley because it was said that they were more welcoming to pleasure boats. But on this day when I called both locks I was told that Barkley was closed during the day and would only open at 5:30pm. Kentucky Lock was open but we would have to wait for a while because commercial traffic gets priority. So we chose Kentucky.

when we arrived we found a dozen other boats already waiting. We found a spot out of the way and dropped our anchor. We ended up waiting about three hours. When we eventually locked through there were 14 boats in the lock. There were limited numbers of floating pins to tie to, so boats had to raft up to each other. It was quite a circus.

Upon departing the lock we were only about a mile from the Green Turtle Bay Marina. The weather was starting to decline so we were glad to be there.

We had to spend three nights here because of poor weather conditions.