If there wasn’t ugly how would we recognize beautiful?

 The Not so Pretty Section of the Loop

We had a feeling that the river system going down the center of the country was only going to be but so good. First the waterways. The trip thus far in the Illinois river has been heavy industrial with many barges some three wide and 16 deep being pushed by tows that have 16,000 horse power. The river is lined with silos and elevators that load materials onto the barges bound for northern and southern ports.

 

This section appears where all the dirty work of America gets done. Moving things like stone, cement, grain, petroleum, chemicals, well you get the idea. The trick is to be able to pass the big tows without running out of the channel and going aground.  Oh by the way the Illinois river is not straight and also happens to be 9’ below normal pool. Guess where you meet most of the tows? So far so good though.

We have been told that these tows are small in comparison to the ones on the Mississippi. Oh joy. On Friday we headed to Heritage Harbor in Ottawa, Illinois about 46 miles down stream but two commercial locks to pass. The first one right outside of Jolliet was quick and efficient. The second which was just 4 miles from our destination was not so much. We waited almost four hours which put us into port at 5:15 pm meaning we were late for Docktails.

After getting settled we quickly remedied that situation. We were invited to tag along with two Looper families to go into town for dinner at a Sushi/Burger joint. They had a 10 passenger van so we jumped in. Turns out the Sushi was pretty dog gone good. 

We had only planned one night but decided to stay an extra as the dockmaster gives a briefing on boating 500 miles south all the way to Kentucky. We thought that might be useful as he is also the local Tow Boat US captain. Think he might know a thing or two??? Saturday I did some early morning planning and Sue some boat chores like laundry and such. We borrowed the loaner car after lunch and went to town and a state park called Buffalo Rock. Crazy enough they have a small herd of Buffalo there. We had a good hike and made it back to the 4pm briefing at the marina. Sue decided to sit that one out which was probably a good thing as it lasted over 2.5 hours. It was packed full of valuable information that really raised my level of confidence. As the story goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Everybody has guide books in one form or another that make all kinds of recommendations about anchorages, marinas and alike. Well when the river is 9’ below level the books are not worth the paper they are written on. So it worth the hours of being in river school on a Saturday evening. I caught up with Sue at the marina restaurant where we met up with another boating couple, Dog House, we had not seen in a couple months. We had a night cap aboard Next Chapter and called it a day.