Friday, September 20, 2013

Thoughts on the rivers..

Some thoughts on the Illinois River.....not at all what we expected.  We had it in our heads that the shores would be treed and heavily lined with houses.  I for one wasn't really expecting a lot of barges until we got to the Mississippi.  I guess no one ever really talks about the Illinois so my preconceived ideas where way off the mark.  

Here Port and Starboard changed to LDB (left descending bank) and RDB (right descending bank) LDB being port if you are going south and starboard if you are coming north. (Get it?)

The river started out with heavy industrialization in the Chicago area, not pretty as you could tell from 
the photos but very interesting,

There was very little housing on the river the 320 miles we travelled and the few that were there were mostly on stilts about 30' off the ground because of the heavy flooding they get here.

There were very few towns on the waterway itself and if there was a town it was small.
Not many marinas and those that were there were small and often silted in so only shallow draft boats could get in.

There were even fewer anchorages because it shallows quickly out of the channel.

There were more birds on this river than anywhere we have been!  We saw Bald Eagles, Hawks, Martins, Geese, Ducks, Herons and more White Pelicans than we could count.  With all the industry you'd think they'd have three wings or two heads from the pollution, but they looked pretty normal to me!

The Mississippi has been far from what I expected.....I thought it would be this huge wide river "The Mighty Mississippi" with tons of barges hampering traffic, lots of towns and houses.  I guess I expected it to be busy and exciting.

We are almost at the end of our portion of the Mississippi and I would hazard a guess that it gets more exciting and bigger on the lower portion which we will not be travelling on.  Don't get me wrong it has been interesting, but again no houses lining the shores and the only cities we have passed are Alton, St. Louis and Cape Girardeau.  There are NO marinas on the portion of the river past Hoppies , which is three 100 foot barges tied together on the bank of the Mississippi run by Hoppie and his wife Fern who is THE person to talk to about the river.  Fern & Hoppie took the marina over from his dad in the sixties and their is nothing she doesn't know about the Upper Mississippi.  She is a trusted source of information for all Loopers.  Every afternoon she does an information session for all the cruisers at her docks about the upcoming portions of the river all the way through the Ohio portion to Green Turtle Bay, in Kentucky. The barges are tied to the upper banks of the river with steel cables.

Anchorages are again very hard to find because of the low water levels but because there are no marinas you have to make do.

We have not seen the number of barges I thought we would during the day, but at night they seem to move more.  Maybe to stay away from the hassle of the "Pleasure Craft" going south!

The Corp of Engineers has whittled the river down to a canal in places with their wing dams and weir dams which according to Fern at Hoppies are causing the great sand 'beaches' along the waterway. They started this to 'direct the river' and alleviate the need to dredge but now they are constantly moving the bouys because of the changing paths of the channels.  You can see that the river was once very wide but now you can see a lot of wide wide 'beaches' that go up to the tree line. 
This ever changing river makes it hard for the tows because they are often maneuvering in narrow spaces, but they are pros and make it look easy.

In a nutshell it is fascinating but not at all what we expected.

Met some great people at Hoppies though, especially Captain Scooter and Mate Jeff who are delivering a 61' Ocean Alexander Sportfish from Duluth to the Florida Panhandle.  They had us over for docktails on the Kaskaskia lock wall where we spent Wednesday night and we got a reprieve from the 85 degree heat on the air conditioned fly bridge....how cool is that!  Great guys whom we hope to meet up with at a later date.

I know the pictures are what you really want so I made it easy.....

  Mississippi River Slideshow   again, click the  i  for the captions and the speaker for the music....if you need to be entertained  :-)

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