Green Turtle Bay is on the top of our list of marina's to stay at. We stayed a week to clean the boat, make minor repairs, and see the local sights.  Marion, Ginny, Barbara and Beverly got in a round of doubles tennis.  I got caught up on the web page.

Barbara walked with us to town for lunch at Patti's 1880 Settlement Restaurant. It's one of those "You have to go there" places. The Settlement grew out of a small family owned motel and diner. It now has a half a dozen gift shops, a petting zoo, a ladies boutique, a wedding chapel, a bridal cottage, a Miniature Golf course, Kiddie rides, a bakery and three restaurants. All of this in a lovely garden setting complete with waterfalls and honking geese. It's what I would call "High Class Hillbilly".

Patti's is famous for their smoked Pork Chops so we all had them for lunch. They were quite good. Don and Ann Thomson stayed an extra day to have some time with us. Don really liked the pork chops so we went a second time to Patti's.  This time Don did the pork chops and two of us switched to Beef Oscar and a third to a chicken dish.  Not too good.  Rating $$$, Pork chops ***, Other stuff **.

Because Green Turtle Bay is a major stop off point on the Great Loop you meet a lot of people passing through. We met Dick and Juliet Stockstill of Sagittarius and Dave and Linda Coleman of Serenity on the pier next to us. They are members of Cedar Creek Yacht Club and were traveling together. We toured each others boats did happy hour, and got some good advice on the waterway ahead. Dave helped me fix the air horn and I must report that with additional tuning it now sounds less like a hoarse cow mooing, and more like an eighteen wheeler.

We also met Bill and Elfrida Miller, Change of Life, and Jim and Liz Dupes, Second Abode, who are also doing the Loop. They knew many of the TMCA Loopers from contacts as far back as Solomon's in the Chesapeake. Also Linda and John Freeston, S/V A Sante, caught up with us the night before we were leaving.

Tennessee in Two Days
 

There are not a lot of places to stay on the Tennessee River so we decided to do it in two days.  We were falling behind the rest of the Loopers and wanted to catch up.  There is a lot of very pretty scenery along the way. This the right bank in the morning with the mountains in the background.  >>

We stopped for one night at Cuba Landing and plugged in to shore power. We wanted to see the first presidential debate.  That evening we watched the debate with Bill and Elfrida Miller, Change of Life and their two guests, plus David and Monique Nagy S/V Seahorse we had passed that afternoon in their 26 foot sailboat. Beauregard, our cat, interrupted the viewing several times with loud proclamations of his own presidential candidacy. He got bored half way through the debate and decided to beat up Belle, his sister.  Our guests seemed ready for the comic relief this fracas provided.  The party: 4 Republicans, 2 Democrats and 2 Undeclared was otherwise quiet.

The next morning we left at sunrise and arrived at our destination at sunset.  The trip was over 100 miles and upstream against a 2.5 kts current.  There was more spectacular scenery - the best since Georgian Bay.  Here are some of the homes we saw on the cliffs above the river. As we pulled in to Aqua Marina we were greeted by the Thomsons and the Schwartzes.  Wow, what a surprise!