Panther Bay is a remote and beautiful spot! We decided to stay 2 days.

We did some fishing.  Didn’t catch much it was quite windy and there were very few fishing boats out.  That should have been our first clue.  But what we did catch was an Asian Carp.  It fought like a bass and was fun to catch. It was 15 inches long but we didn’t keep it.  It is unusual to catch one using a pole because they are plankton eaters.  We tried to catch them on the rivers where there were hundreds of them feeding but ended up catching one in the middle of the bay right off our boat.

We saw lots of this type of structure. They plant the fry in these areas so the big fish can’t get in there to eat them.

There were also buoys marked fish attractors where they deposit stump and moss etc. for cover for the fish.

I was a bit concerned about getting enough exercise living on a boat but we are out and about all the time.  One form of exercise is displayed below.. This is what happens when husbands don’t get everything they want like a trolling motor for their dinghy 😉

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We did a lot of hiking at Panther Bay. We heard there was an old cemetery up and old road off of one of the points.  We took the one that looked the most likely and were walking quite a ways up a two-track road. There, tacked to a tree in the middle of no where, we see this:

We knew we were on the right path. We took the path leading that way.  It was in farther than I would have thought when we found this:

 

The cemetery must have been the Bailey Family cemetery.  We only found about 8 head stones and they were all plain, no writing on them. The majority were in a row. Surprisingly you could see the indentations in the ground where the bodies were buried.

We didn’t find any house foundations or proof of civilization.  We suspect the cemetery was placed on the hill to prevent flood damage. The town is probably underwater.  The Tennessee river was flooded by the Barkley Dam back in the 60s. to make the huge Barkley and Kentucky Lakes.

I’m not done with cemeteries yet.  We found yet another one, again on top of a hill but this one was in the middle of a camp ground with a wire fence around it. There were carved head stone and some like the ones  we saw with no markings. Most of the carved ones were for Children 3 to 5 years old.  How sad.  The dates were from the 1820s One adult we saw was definitely in the Civil war era.  It was quite odd that someone put PVC or bamboo crosses by the unmarked stones.  One unlucky find was a dead possum in the cemetery.  Yuck.

We found some great hiking trails and put on some miles.  I haven’t spent that much time in the woods since we camped with our kids when they were young.  We sure slept well that night.

Thanks for reading.

Karen and Scott