Our journey began with a 700 mile trip down the river from Sale Creek, Tennessee to Mobile, Alabama. The first 270 miles were on the Tennessee River, followed by 400 miles on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway. Completed in 1985, the Tenn-Tom was a massive federal project–more earth is said to have been moved here than in digging the Panama Canal–to connect the Tennessee to the Tombigbee so that commercial traffic would no longer have to go north on the Tennessee, then up to the Ohio, then down the Mississippi to reach the Gulf of Mexico. For recreational boaters who no longer have to fight the extreme currents and river traffic on…