Documenting Years of Living on a Houseboat

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Thanks for checking in on us. I'm Martin. In this video, we're going to take a look at a barge that's replacing a bridge on the Duck River. We're also going to check back in on Beach Creek, which was our most popular site from 2 years ago. We're also going to go back into a backwater area and point out the difference between a flood wash that's going to become dangerous and a backwater.

[00:00:51]The corner of the night, the warm your hands.

[00:00:59]held in your arms. The hole in my head goes home.

[00:01:14]And I don't want to die, but I don't want to die.

[00:01:22]I'm not going too clocks from the monsters in my head. Do you want to know my name? Is that all you want to take from me? In your arms?

[00:01:56]Yes. In my eyes? And I don't want to die in my sleep. When you live.

[00:02:02]No.

[00:02:04]Call me when you're home. Call me when you call me.

[00:02:55]So the barges come apart into semisiz cranable barges and then they built it together and they carry the crane and the barge and that barge here on semi-trailers and it's a special bridge company. All they do is bridge work.

[00:03:33]This is what the river sees. This is the entrance that the river sees here.

[00:03:40]Those are very loose.

[00:03:43]You could actually bring the house boat right through here. And I have I have before a couple years ago.

[00:03:50]So depending on the water height, you can get in and out of here with the house boat. And then depending on how tall your boat is. So if your boat's more than 8 ft tall, it starts to be where you hit that tree.

[00:04:18]Yeah, if you remember, we stayed right in here on the cliff.

[00:04:26]We anchored out, but we didn't anchor out. We tied to three trees is what happened. We had one anchor and two trees.

[00:04:35]Look at that right there. It's perfect.

[00:04:47]Problem is the river is normally not that low and that's typically water that's not land.

[00:05:20]I'm trying to keep the sun out of the screen. It's such a weird time of day right now.

[00:05:26]All right, we're going to take some time to go underneath this tree.

[00:05:33]What are you thinking, buddy?

[00:05:45]I guarantee that. score. Every single crawling animal uses this as a as a bridge to get across here or maybe even right up here.

[00:06:01]Yeah.

[00:06:02]All right. Um, if I go right by the trunk Look at that. It's a road. There's a road right there.

[00:07:28]River, stay in the boat.

[00:07:35]Boy, we're going to get out and go walk on that road.

[00:07:46]Look at this spot right here.

[00:07:50]That's a pretty good spot for river to get out, too.

[00:08:11]Let's go check out that road.

[00:08:16]I'm pretty sure we can go underneath both of these.

[00:08:21]Look at how it's stone all the way down to like 3 ft.

[00:08:27]And you could tell the water is typically higher than this just by the way the ground is right here with no plants on it. That's typically underwater to like right here if there wasn't a drought.

[00:08:45]This is a cool spot.

[00:08:49]a lot of living trees hanging over here, which would it makes this kind of um a place to come in and camp rather than bring a house boat in. But that first entrance was one of my favorite spots to have my house boat on the entire Duck River when I came here last year or the year before.

[00:09:09]I'm going to put him on a leash.

[00:09:12]He is so hyper right now. Oh, just relax, buddy. Relax.

[00:09:23]Yeah, there's a road here. A muddy one, but there's a road.

[00:09:29]I figure we'll walk towards the Duck River, see where the road goes, and then we'll walk back and see where it comes from. So, look real closely at the screen. I'm also going to come up here, and I'm going to show a little sunlight so you can see if there was reflections.

[00:09:44]You see how there's no bugs, right? Everyone tells me the whole world's going to end. There's so many mosquitoes. There's not. That's only when you turn on lights in the middle of the night.

[00:09:57]All right. So, here's my widest angle lens. But here's Look at this. This is the road we're on. Here's another road.

[00:10:10]Huh.

[00:10:12]So we could walk river here in the morning on one road in the afternoon on a different road.

[00:10:23]Don't go off the trail.

[00:10:25]After a little bit more than a mile, we ended up at this cabin. There were two other cabins along the road, too.

[00:10:35]This is the end of the other road. That was a fork in the road. We just went to the end of both of them.

[00:10:42]You always can tell from the number of trees that they stuck underneath the tires how bad they were stuck.

[00:10:50]They cut down almost two or three trees.

[00:10:51]And then look at they they left their chair. They drove over their chair and destroyed it.

[00:11:00]That was a really cool walk. So tomorrow we'll come back and we'll take the road the other way and see how many houses are along it.

[00:11:11]It's just a a road off of Bakerville coming into Waverly.

[00:11:25]So, this is the area where we had the house built right here. And then just on the other side of where that tree is down, it wasn't down last year or two years ago. You can always tell when the tree fell because of the leaves on it.

[00:11:39]If they're underwater, it fell within the last couple of weeks. If the leaves are not underwater, it fell more than a couple weeks ago. If it's growing perfect leaves like that, it typically just recently fell.

[00:11:55]But this is where the house boat was.

[00:12:00]The reason I mentioned that is cuz that was my number one most viewed episode.

[00:12:05]People watched 30 plus minutes of river and me bringing the house boat here and staying here and checking out this creek. Beach Creek, by the way, is the name of it.

[00:12:23]Really beautiful place. Look at all that. Look at the trail right there.

[00:12:26]Like that's a whole another area that we were just walking in. It'd be great.

[00:12:35]So, we're at the bottom of this overflow channel that's just runs parallel with the main channel. And I want to show you guys.

[00:12:46]So, one of the reasons, you know, that this doesn't have full current in here ever is because look at the bottom of this thing. It's not blown out. It's not like there's a bunch of stuff pushed out of here or anything like that.

[00:13:00]It essentially is a bunch of sediment that was left here because the current backwashes, does a little spiral, and comes back in here slow. Otherwise, if the current was coming down here going the same way as the river, it's would be busted out. This would be deep and there would be a um you know, like a actual beach that comes off of the corner of that. But instead, it's not. It's just a bunch of sediment that's sitting here at the bottom of a meandering patch of water.

[00:13:34]And in fact, I can't even get out there.

[00:13:37]Yesterday, we could come and go through that and the water was like a foot higher. It actually came up a foot for two days and went down a foot. Now, we got to go this this route.

[00:14:06]Plus the fact that lo the logs are over here on this side versus not on the inside also tells you something.

[00:14:25]So you see between those two hills when the hill goes boom and starts another one. I'm in there.

[00:15:03]Every once in a while a uh a comment will kind of hit me a little bit. And a few a few months ago, there was a woman who said that she was 82 years old and that she had lived a life of travel and many of the things in my channel she had done like actually done this river, gone to this place, lived in a van in this desert, did almost all the things that I had done.

[00:15:36]And she said, "But I didn't document it." The fact that I'm sitting here and I document it makes it a body of work, right? Makes it so much more important.

[00:15:48]I was thinking about that in this last week because a lot of people are worried about not only me being on the river, but something going wrong on this river.

[00:15:58]Um, I was down here in 21 in the historic flood. I was just not even 100 miles up river camping, right? Uh 2 years ago, there was another huge flood here and I used that flood to go as far as I could up river in a boat just like this. And I brought my house boat and stayed here for 2 weeks watching the waters recede.

[00:16:24]And I I I'm not like I'm not saying fishing on the shore, going boating a couple times for a few hours during it.

[00:16:31]I literally lived in the flood zone watching it come down, seeing how one bay now no longer has current because the water got to this point, which bays didn't have current, which bays did. And I watched it all wash away, right? And then now in the last two years, we've come up here a couple of times just in quick boats to go as far as we could go on regular years where there's no flooding and no drought. Now this whole series is happening and I feel comfortable keeping my boat in the middle of these creeks, in the middle of these flood zones because there's a historic drought, right? So, when you go back and you watch everything to have to do with the duck in my series, you're going to see me living in a flood zone. You're going to see me watching the flood zone come down.

[00:17:29]You're also going to see me doing it regularly here, exploring on a regular years. And then you're going to see me doing this on a drought year where everything I'm looking at, there's so much water missing here. So, we're able to see what's underneath everything and all the obstructions and the way that the land forms and what the actual base of the river is when normally you would never get to see that, right?

[00:17:54]So, don't worry about it. Don't worry about us. If it gets dangerous, I'll know beforehand and I'll take care of it.

[00:18:04]Worst case scenario, me, River, and Cricket will stand on the shore and watch everything go by.

[00:18:12]This is one of those areas where it looks like a backwash and it half of it is essentially when you're coming in here. You can kind of see something happens up here where you can tell that the current from the main channel does come back in here and does move quickly through here. Essentially, a lot of people would look at this on the map and think, well, the river receded or the river changed direction.

[00:18:37]And basically, if you go back hundreds of thousands of years or however many it is, there's there would be a lot more water here because less water would be taken out from all the cities. So, this island would actually be underwater and there'd be no trees. However, by looking at how old the trees are, you can see that that hasn't been the case in any recent history, right?

[00:19:03]So, if there is to be a flood and water were to come out of here quickly, right, there th those trees and all that debris would act just like the mangroves do in Florida where it would stop anything. it would filter it out, calm it down, make it come through um without any debris and probably even much slower without force.

[00:19:27]You know, it wouldn't barge through. It would kind of slow itself down, grabbing on friction on all the leaves and everything. But here's the problem. If you come into these places and there's like this right here, you see these logs? This is a sign. This is one of the signs where I would be like, I don't know about this.

[00:19:55]Don't mind the wind. The wind's coming this direction, which is against the current. That's not how it would normally be. You see all these logs, big, thick, and they're all they all look like they're trying to float through here, right?

[00:20:07]That means that this thing drained quickly. Very quickly. And if it's going to drain quickly like that where it's pulling logs into the forest, you wouldn't want to be any part of that, right? So I I'll show you further up where stuff like this doesn't happen.

[00:20:24]And you need to look at these. So if you have something like that happening and your boat is past that point, right?

[00:20:31]your boat is here in this part, you're going to be dealing with current cuz that current's coming back through here and going right through the mangrove type plants back into the main channel.

[00:20:43]And it's I mean it's showing you very clear that's what it's doing, right?

[00:20:50]This is a place I would stay. So, this is the same body of water that we were videoing on this whole time, except there's an there's a peninsula or it's actually more likely an island when the water is high with full growth trees on it, one or two big ones. But you could go on either side of that to avoid the current and avoid the straight winds.

[00:21:14]Otherwise, there's no along this whole waterway. There's no side cuts whereas there so there's no real safe harbor from any direct winds coming through here. You'd basically have to point the boat directly into the strong winds and hope for the best kind of thing. So I always go into like a a a cutout where the wind doesn't hit me. This island would would make that. And then there's another one a little bit further down.

[00:21:41]Both of those you could hide in either direction of the wind and current.

[00:21:46]provided that the island was still showing, you know what I mean? That the water didn't get high enough to be over that.

[00:21:58]The white PVC, they typically have a sticker that say uh TVA on them. They are game attractors.

[00:22:07]But that is a that's how you know you're in a not only a navigable channel, but a mapped channel because the TVA has come in here and place that here and it's on a map. They know it's here. They come and check on it.

[00:22:22]So whenever you see those, those are not that's not a normal person putting that in or a regular person putting that in.

[00:22:29]That's a the Tennessee Valley Authority doing it.

[00:22:36]This is the view of that little peninsula that sticks out. And then there's one right there, too. So, you could use either one. And then, to be honest, if you just came in here, anywhere in here is actually between the two islands or two peninsulas. So, you just stayed right back in there. That should stop you from wind coming from you have no fetch for wind or current.

[00:22:59]And then you have the sun coming up.

[00:23:03]Basically, it's already giving shade and it's not even 10:00 in the morning right now. So, you'd be in shade most of the time.

[00:23:11]Yeah. I mean, honestly, you could stay 200 ft from shore and still be out of the main everything out here, right?

[00:23:18]That's a very safe harbor. We might even move there from where we're at.

[00:23:25]We'll see. I kind of want to move up the main channel so we can do some more exploring.

[00:23:39]Oh.

[00:23:50]Oh.

[00:24:00]Oh.

[00:24:05]Oh, Come on.

[00:24:51]Sh.