Shanty Boats

The river systems tend to have smoother waters which do not require the most seaworthy of craft.  Oh, they can get rough in storms, particularly when the winds blow up the river rather than across it, but compared to the Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic, they are comparably calm waters.

Rivers have called to people for centuries to ride their waters.  Tom Sawyer rode the Mighty Mississippi on a raft.  The Tennessee and TennTom are much quieter bodies of water.  Today, people cruise the rivers in boats not much more seaworthy than Sawyer's raft.  These folks prove that it does not take a large investment to be able to enjoy the waterways.  Their term for these vessels is "shanty boats."

The unnamed boat above is stopped along the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway so the boater can walk his dog.  This boat, and the one on the left, are constructed on aluminum floats from an old pontoon boat.  All Ya Need, the name of the left boat, is descriptive of the boater's philosophy on cruising.  Instead of a port of call, he has painted "Shanty Boat" across the back.

Slanty Shanty, the most rustic of the shanties encountered, had an interesting story.  The boat was constructed with a plywood deck floating on blue, 55 gallon barrels and dock floats.  Powered by a 9.9 outboard, it has a top speed of 2 mph.  A young couple piloted this boat from Pittsburgh, down the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers with the goal of making it to Panama City, Florida.  They did accomplish most of the trip, ending the journey at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola.  After a rough crossing of Mobile Bay, where following seas swamped the outboard, they decided that the big bays between them and Panama City were more than the shanty boat could handle.  And, they had a buyer for the boat in Pensacola (you thought this was a tough boat market).  Appropriately, the young lady who led this adventure is named Faith.  (That's a pet chicken in her lap below.)

Reading List

Living on a shanty boat was once a way of life in which many lived.  In Shanty Boat: A River Way of Life, Harlan Hubbard describes a four-year journey undertaken by he and his wife down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, during 1944-1948.  Their self-built boat was made of timbers from a building that was being torn down.  It was an unpowered barge, controlled on the downriver flow with long paddles, called sweeps, on deck and with a rowed john boat tied to it to assist with steering in sometimes heavy currents.  When upriver travel was needed, as when they traveled up the Cumberland River to spend a summer in Kentucky, the shanty boat had to be towed. They lived off the river and land, trading fish caught on the rivers for dairy and meat, and spending the summer at one spot along the shore where they could cultivate a garden - a way of life that would be difficult to duplicate today.  Shoreside land owners easily gave the Hubbards permission to tie the boat to their land and allowed them to have a nearby piece of land to maintain a vegetable garden.  Today, many waterfront landowners get quite angry if a boat even anchors in view of their property and the river fish population is much less.  Shanty Boat is well written and detailed description of their years living on the rivers.