22 September 2014

“Foster learns how to be patient”

Today is my grand daughter’s first birthday!!! We can’t be there in person, but we will do a video call with her.

We got off to a good start. We had spent the night at Starved Rock Marina, only a mile north of the Starved Rock Lock. I called at 6:30 and asked about going down. They said 2 ½ to 3 hours and we were to call them at 9. So I called at 9 and they said 2 ½ hours, but they may be able to fit us in. We should come get on one of the “cells” at 10. (A cell is a 20′ diameter pile that the tow’s use to teather to while they wait to lock. So we went the mile and got to the lock at 10 AM

There was a tow there that would need to do a split. That’s where they shove the first two to three barges in the lock, send them down, pull them out, refill the lock and then put the rest of the tow in and send it down.

We sat on the cell until until 12:30 PM and got into the lock with the tow. (So far we’ve been able to share thanks to the Captains.) The tow was going to do a crew change in the lock, but their van was late, so we sat with them in the lock until 1:40. So we had traveled 3 miles of our planned 60.

We reset our plan, new plan was to go as far as Henry, another 30 miles down river. Not a big deal, we have lots of good weather coming up. We will split the 60 mile trip into two much easier 30 mile ones.

This section of the river from mile 231 to mile 196 was very pretty. There were not a lot of barge loading and unloading areas, lots and lots of open river. Two places were loading some kind of grain, another was loading gravel. There is a coal fired power plant, they had a claw picking coal and dumping it into a conveyer belt to feed the plant.

The water was very flat, it was a very nice ride. There were a few thumps from the Asian Carp as we went. We met two up bound tugs, and just before Henry passed the down-bound tug that had gone through the lock before our tow.

Henry marina has two parts, the 100 year old abandoned lock, and a marina with slips. We opted to try to get into one of the slips. With no wind it was easy, but we did find that the water was only 5 feet deep in spots, so we churned a lot of mud up. In the process we also spooked the carp which came flying out around us. We tied to a 40′ dock, there were only 6 other boats so we didn’t think it would make any difference. 5PM, we were docked.

I went to plug in the power and found that there were bee’s nests under the cover. Susan sprayed them and then we got us powered up.

Our dinner plans were for steaks that Susan picked up in Chicago. I paid for the slip at The Landings, if you get a chance you should go. The full rack of ribs is the entire rack, so it overflows the plate on both ends. They looked very good. I got a few beers to go and headed back to the boat.

One of our new dock neighbors came over to talk. He said that most Loopers stay out on the old lock with the 11 feet of water. He said that there were plans next year to do some repairs on it since the top was coming apart in bigger section. He said it was a popular fuel stop with the Loopers.

Dinner was perfectly cooked up two one pound boneless rib-eye steaks, grilled bok choi with soy glaze and rice. So it turns out the best and cheapest way to get good Chicago steaks is to cook them at home. Most of the places we looked at in Chicago, steaks started at $45 and went up. These had lots of marbled fat in them, they were super tender on the plate.

After dinner we went up to the bar for a beer. They had a “Disco Bowling” video game. You slide the plastic puck along the wood surface about 4′. The screen then shows a computer animation of the “ball” rolling the rest of the way down the lane. With her superior video game skills Susan crushed me in the three games we played.

Tuesday will be an easy 30 mile day, so I’ll hit the hardware store and we will Facetime with the birthday girl in the morning.