21 September 2014

Happy Equinox Day! Today is the last offical day of Summer and the start of Fall. Lucky for us we still have days with 12 hours of Sun. We are still going west, another 200 miles before we turn back east and South. Hopefully we will keep the Sun for our race to Florida.

Today was a dash to beat the wind. The forecast from yesterday was that it would be very windy this morning (gusts to 25) and tapering off this afternoon. Plan A was to wait for the taper. On getting up this morning I saw the front was delayed, gusts would get here about noon. I made a quick call to the lock to find that there were two tows coming South, it would be a 3-4 hour wait unless I could be at the lock in 45-50 minutes.

We did the fastest pack up and undock in our history. 10 minutes after the call I was in the channel and we were steaming towards the lock. 48 minutes later we heard the horn blast saying the lock was open and we entered in! Just in time.

The Captain of the Reunion had told us about the Loopers Loop. You feed a line through some 1.5” plastic tube and make a 2′ circle. The tube holds the loop open to make it easy to get on and off the floating pins. Today was the second test and it worked really well. Susan tossed the loop to the lock hand and he dropped it over the pin. This will make it easy for us to put them on when we are in the bottom of the locks heading up.

We shared the 25′ drop with two small fishing boats. 30 mins later we were at the bottom of the lock and heading down to the Starved Rock Marina in Ottawa. The ride was very pretty, we saw some good scenery. Susan got some great pictures of pelicans that were floating along the shore. We only saw two “upbound” tows, and they were pretty small at 6 and 2 barges each.

We passed the town of Ottawa, it looks very picturesque, but I wanted to get as far down river as I could. The marina I had chosen is close to the next lock, so we will have a short ride to get to it. I’m going to hope that we have good lock Karma and we can get through before traffic gets heavy.

We got to the marina as they opened at 10 AM and headed back to our slip. The owner and another boat owner helped us dock. Yay!

At the end of the dock is one of those mongo houseboats you see pictures of on the lakes in Kentucky and Tennessee. The crew of the Joshua were having breakfast on the aft cockpit (more like a huge deck) with Mimosa’s and Bloody Mary’s. They invited us down, so we did our shutdown sequence and went over. The boat is 105′ by 20′ and is just like a house inside. Our hosts were very gracious and told us about the area. There was a huge wine fest going on, but we were too beat to ride our bikes over.

For lunch we had the leftover Chicago Pizza. While pizza in Chicago was very good, I think I’m sticking with the thin crispy kind (sorry NYC, you didn’t win either).

As predicted the winds started really gusting at noon and blew pretty hard for the afternoon. And it was nice to sit and relax some.

Dinner was at the “Captain’s Cove” the on property restaurant. I had some pretty good ribs, Susan had a huge piece of potato chip crunchy fish. It’s a nice place and we had a great view of the tow going by with 15 barges. We had a discussion on if the center tower lifted. It sounds like a good idea, down for the low bridges up 45 feet to see the front of the tow.

Big day on Monday, hope to do 60+ miles. Starting to feel like my sister trying to plan stages out in her Florida bike adventure.