Most of the Loop is about moving. This is about the part where you stop — and what that stop is usually for.
The Tenn-Tom leaves the Tennessee River right here. It exits Pickwick Lake at Yellow Creek through the Divide Cut and runs south toward Mobile. Carry on upriver instead and you're on the Chattanooga and Knoxville side trip — which plenty of Loopers will tell you is the best water on the whole route.
The catch is the calendar. That side trip costs weeks, and if you're trying to be south before winter, those are the weeks you don't have. That's the real decision at Pickwick, and it's why so many boats sit here while it gets made.
Before you read the rest — I own a rental here. My name's Jesse, I built this site, and I own a house about eight minutes from Safe Harbor Aqua Yacht that I rent out. It's linked further down.
You should know that before the page tries to be useful to you, which is why it's up here and not in the footer. Nobody has ever paid for a placement on Can I Loop?, and the day that changes, this line comes down. But I'm not going to pretend I'm neutral about my own house. If you'd rather skip it, the questions below work anywhere and cost you nothing.
Somewhere on the way south, a lot of Loop boats stop moving at Pickwick for a while. Some of it is planned. Most of it isn't.
None of that shows up in a float plan. It's the part of the trip people find out about while they're in it.
All five are questions for the yard, not for us — but they're easier asked early than discovered late.
The Tenn-Tom runs 234 miles from the Tennessee River to the Black Warrior-Tombigbee junction near Demopolis, Alabama. The connection at this end is the Divide Cut, a 29-mile canal joining Pickwick Lake to Bay Springs Lake.
Ten locks on the Tenn-Tom itself — Whitten at the top of the Divide Cut down to Howell Heflin. But you'll lock through twelve on the way to Mobile. Demopolis and Coffeeville sit below the Tenn-Tom on the Black Warrior-Tombigbee, which is a separate waterway with its own locks.
That's why published counts disagree, and both are right: ten is the waterway, twelve is the trip. If you're planning lock days between here and the Gulf, twelve is your number.
The house is three bedrooms on a wooded acre in Counce, about eight minutes from Safe Harbor Aqua Yacht and eleven from Grand Harbor. There's a washer and dryer, a full kitchen, and you can have parts shipped there — which is the boring detail that matters most when the boat's in the yard.
Staying near Aqua Yacht Harbor →
It doesn't tell you the route. No clearances, no lock dimensions, no fuel stops, no anchorages, and nothing about what any particular yard can lift or how soon. Those are real numbers with consequences, and this page doesn't hold them — the cruising guides, the Corps charts and the yards themselves do, and they're better sources than we are.
We also haven't run it. Everything above about what the stop is for comes from Loopers describing their own stops; the routing comes from published sources. Nobody here has taken a boat through the Divide Cut.
What we do hold is the boat side. If you want to know whether a specific hull clears the Loop's hard limits before you commit to any of this, that's what the rest of the site is for.
Routing and distances from the Corps of Engineers' Tenn-Tom navigation charts, the waterway's published description, and Waterway Guide and Quimby's Cruising Guide on the choice of route. The lock count is from the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway Development Authority's own locks list, which is also what settles it: they list ten on the Tenn-Tom and file Demopolis and Coffeeville separately under the Black Warrior-Tombigbee.
What the stop is actually for comes from Loopers writing publicly about their own transits and their own yard time. We have not run this stretch ourselves, and the questions above are the ones we'd ask, not answers we hold.
If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — support@caniloop.net. A correction from someone who has actually run it is worth more than anything we can write.
Related: the calendar pressure behind the decision on this page is the same one the completion figures describe. How long the Loop actually takes →