June 18, 2007

Today was another milestone completed. We finished the Illinois Waterway part of the trip which was approximately 333 miles. We just keep lucking out with the weather. We got some really heavy rain showers during the day but with no thunder and lightning so Shorty got a little bit of a bath. We are tied up tonight at the Grafton Marina which is at mile zero on the Illinois Waterway. In Quimby’s this marina is given 5 anchors which means it is very nice with everything close by. We needed a few groceries as we were running really low and they just gave us the keys to a car and said about seven blocks up was the grocery store. We got everything done, signed in, groceries and here comes the thunderstorm which had been following us late this afternoon and we were nice and safe in our slip. The river was so interesting, the tows and barges kept getting larger and so did the elevators and all along the way the Electric plants which use barged in coal just kept getting larger the from Chicago till now. We will be running on the Mississippi River tomorrow and have two locks to negotiate before we reach St. Louis so it will be a busy day. The next place for fuel since we fueled up tonight will be a place called Hoppy’s on the Mississippi and I think it is better than two hundred miles or close to it before we get there so it will be conservation time for fuel as it was today on our trip. Since we had the current with us we eased up a little on the rpms for the same speed. The scenery was really nice today with occasional bluffs along the way and lots of sandy beaches as we had for the length of the river. Lots of birds and we can’t verify it for sure but we saw what looked to be an eagle fishing in front of us a ways today. He swooped down very fast scooped something out of the water and flew off to one side so all we got was a good rear view of the bird. It had a huge wingspread though. The grain elevators were loading barges today and the coal barges were being unloaded at the electric plants along the way. Of course being a Monday there were very few other boats and the tows and us had our way. We came up to the lock today that was our final one and called the lockmaster on the radio and he said come on in the gates open so what can be a long job took only ten minutes to complete today. It has been so interesting to do the locks because if you look closely each one is a little different and the personnel at the locks are the same. Some of them hurry and others take it like it’s a serious government job and no hurry should be involved. Today’s lockmaster was really fast and he still stopped and said hello while others seem to hide out somewhere and communicate by loudspeaker. Most have been very helpful especially in Canada where they seemed to have the answers to everything, good marinas, and locks close or in the center of town, grocery stores, etc. Here it seems to be get it going and you find it. I know it seems as though we have been going really fast but we run faster on large bodies of water than other boats and we have had absolutely the best weather you could ever dream of having and instead of fiddling until the weather got bad we have been taking advantage of it and going more miles per day because we still have lots of time to sit out weather later on.