Boat U.S. - January 2008 - (Page 27) Photo courtesy of Concordmarina.com Concord Marina, on the Tennessee River near Knoxville, built additional transient docks using a 2002 BIG grant. Fall is a great time to cruise the Tennessee River and enjoy the changing colors of the season. Photo courtesy of Rick and Jeanne Klein These two lakes, part of the massive Tennessee Valley Authority water management projects of the 1930s, form a major crossroads for boaters cruising the Great Loop. That’s the increasingly popular water route around the entire eastern U.S. via inland rivers, Gulf and Atlantic waterways, major coastal tributaries and the Great Lakes. Poolos says an estimated 5,000 boats, cruising all or portions of the Great Loop, pass through Tennessee each year. Uncounted numbers of local boaters in the four-state region use the two river systems for shorter trips and vacation cruises as well. Boaters on extended cruises — snowbirds running between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, for example, or really serious cruisers circumnavigating via the Great Loop — already have a whole lot of waterways open to them but they tend to stick to the beaten north-south path. Now, thanks to the BIG program and projects like the Tennessee Boating Trail, these added facilities give transients the services they need to explore what veteran cruisers Ron and Eva Stob call “the blue highways” of the Heartland. For boaters, the Great Loop is like the interstate highway system, say the Stobs, who cruised the entire 6,300-mile route aboard their 40-foot trawler, Dream O’Genie, in 1994. Inspired by that trip, which is documented in their book Honey, Let’s Get a Boat, they formed the America’s Great Loop Cruisers Association from their home on the Little Tennessee River in 1999. “Now we want to encourage boaters to explore waterways off the Great Loop and projects like the Tennessee Boating Trail provide the infrastructure to help them do just that,” Ron Stob says And that, of course, is just what Congress had in mind when it created the BIG program in 1998 at the urging of BoatU.S. lobbyist Michael G. Sciulla who shepherded the project through the legislative maze. BIG Background The Boating Infrastructure Grant program (BIG) uses federal gas tax monies paid by recreational boaters to add facilities specifically for transients. A good example is Mermaid Marina on the Tennessee River. As the first BIG project in the state, funded in 2000, this BoatU.S. Cooperating Marina installed 200 feet of floating docks and other amenities at Decaturville, TN. BIG funds can also be used to build new facilities, dredge out channels and install up-to-date utilities, which the Cumberland River city of Clarksville did with a 2006 grant. Now boats headed to or from Nashville, an increasingly popular river destination, have a stopover where no access to shore existed before. “It was the boaters who put on the pressure to get transient docks at Clarksville,” Poolos reports. “Before this, you cruised right through the downtown and there was no place to put in if the weather was bad, no way to go ashore for supplies and certainly no safe place to tie up for the night.” Part of the rationale behind BIG is that increased transient traffic will also benefit local waterfront economies. Cities like Chattanooga have made BIG projects key elements in their waterfront redevelopment plans. That city, ancestral home of the South’s iconic confection, the Moon Pie, has completed two BIG projects, one in 2001 and a second in 2005. An 1,800-foot transient dock with water, electric and sewage pumpout equipment now in downtown Chattanooga is part of the city’s 21st Century Waterfront plan. This $120 million revitalization project expanded the waterfront and provided access from the transient docks to major tourist attractions, shopping and services that have blossomed from the redevelopment. The Stobs, who have cruised nearly 9,000 miles by trailered boat on waterways off the beaten path for their new book, Great Loop Side Trips, call Chattanooga “the best urban waterfront redevelopment in North America.” For natural beauty, the next 200 miles of the Tennessee River to Knoxville are outstanding, in the Stobs’ estimation, and boaters en-route to the home of the University of Tennessee have new facilities along the way at Concord Marina, thanks to a 2002 BIG grant. Another one of the goals of the BIG Program is to connect boaters with shoreside visitor attractions. Facilities constructed at Pickwick Landing State Park in 2004 as part of the trail make Shiloh National Military Park accessible to cruising boaters. While it’s a short rental car ride, the stopover to visit this historic Civil War site is an increasingly popular side trip. The Tennessee Boating Trail, while complete, is not necessarily finished, Poolos says. Now the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency will be developing promotional materials, maps and signage for the trail. In addition, the agency will conduct assessments and talk to boaters who use the BIG facilities. The goal is to determine who is using the trail, where they come from, how to improve it and where cruising boaters may need future transient facilities. For more information on the BIG program, and to suggest locations in your state that could benefit from this grant program, visit BoatUS.com/gov/big. — By Ryck Lydecker Tennessee Boating Trail Resources Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency: www.tnwildlife.org America’s Great Loop Cruisers Association: www.greatloop.com BoatU.S. Cooperating Marina program: www.BoatUS.com/marinas BoatU.S. Magazine January 2008 27 http://Concordmarina.com http://www.BoatUS.com/gov/big http://www.tnwildlife.org http://www.greatloop.com http://www.BoatUS.com/marinas
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