Locks, Barges and New Friends Oh My!

September 21 through September 23 (Click on the images to see and scroll them in full size)

Thursday morning we left the Sunset Bay Marina headed for our next destination, the Joliet City Docks. Really just a concrete wall we could tie up to for the night near their Bicentennial park. But there were good cleats, power and they were free!

Along the way, we checked Nebo, which is an app that helps us keep track of the other looper boats that are in our area. If you remember from one of my earlier posts, Nebo got us our first invitation to "Docktails" in Port Washington. Once we got on the river, we noticed two other boats in our areas, Anne Marie, and the Make It So. They were also headed to Joliet, so we traveled together past barges and on big lock which dropped us almost 40 feet.

The locks are amazing. You wait for the green light, then pull in and so far we have tied to floating bollards, I have one pictured above. Then they close the gates and pump the water down. We dropped 40 feet in only a few minutes. Sometimes if there are lots of boats, you need to raft off of each other because there are not enough bollards to go around. We have had several locks where boats were tied next to each other or "rafted up" three deep so we could fit everyone in.

Once we arrived at the Joliet wall, we had to do some jockeying to get all of the boat in. We had boats from 32 feet long to over 60 feet long and there were a lot of us. But it all worked out with some cooperation and once we got situated, it was time for swapping introductions and sharing our scariest loop stories at docktails. It is a good thing that Christine did not hear these stories before we left....

Early in the morning we left Joliet because we knew that we had 3 big locks to go through before we got to Ottawa and Heritage Harbor Marina. For some reason, Patriot ended up leading the pack of loopers, including Cavu, Next Chapter, Fish and Chill, Sea moose and we picked up an American Tug, Encore half way down. Not sure how, but Patriot got put in the lead, I guess they knew something that I didn't. But I did my best, calling tugs for passing instructions, checking ahead on lock's status, checking on how the locks wanted us to tie up and telling bad jokes about the movie Convoy during the trip down. All went smoothly until our last lock. Marseilles. At that lock, they were locking through a HUGE load of barges, they had to break the tow into two pieces and raise the first one, then go back for the 2nd load. The finished barges when the pulled out of the lock must have been 200 yards long! The downside for us was a 4.5 hour wait at the top of the lock.

But it was OK, we tied up next to the American Tug in our little fleet and we got to meet and get to know Glen and Carole, the owners of Encore. After we locked through unfortunately we missed the 4 pm briefing that is so famous. The harbormaster gives a briefing on moving down the river all the way to Paducah that we have heard is not to be missed. I will take all of the information I can possibly get, so we decided to stay an extra day to be able to take that in. Heritage Harbor is a beautiful marina and has great facilities including a "courtesy car" which we took into town to do some shopping. This Chevy Suburban had lots of miles on it and several warning lights that I don't think should have been on, but it got us to Walmart and back safely (Once you could get the fiddly key to turn). Tomorrow, we head further down river and will probably anchor out for our first time during this trip somewhere near Henry Illinois.

It is 8:00 PM and we just finished dinner. The Harbor master's briefing was almost 3 hours long and Jeremy Fowler gave the most amazing briefing with such pertinent information on locks, water levels and hazards on this stretch that I cannot imagine doing this next 500 miles without it. His knowledge of this stretch of river is absolutely incredible. It is going to be some of the most challenging boating that I have ever done and I am thankful for everything that he shared. To summarize Jeremy's briefing.... You ain't seen nothing yet!