Cruising on the river system has been wonderful, BUT I am getting a little tired of seeing sunrises over XYZ River. The picture at the right is, you guessed it, sunrise over the Ohio River as we were raising the anchor at 6:35 am. The view is toward the Kentucky side of the river (southeast) with Illinois on the side behind the camera. The overnight temperature went into the lower 60s F so we slept well without air conditioning. Our trip for the day was only 75 miles, but most of the trip was going up river into a 2+/- mph current so we knew that it would be a long day.
During the night, there was a big hatch of May Flies, and all of the boats had hundreds all over them. We had decided to travel today in the company of the other 3 Loopers who had anchored at the same place. The picture at the left of Twelve Stones with the dark/black areas being clusters of May Flies. Twelve Stones is actually a pretty boat that is styled like a classic Florida Bay coaster. The bugs are not harmful but they just stay there. There was not enough wind to blow them off. Some of us used the raw water wash down pump to rinse most of them off, but it was still a mess...
The first event of the day was to go across the river and follow a channel through the Olmsted Dam, which is still under construction. They are building the dam as pre-cast concrete segments up the bank on the Illinois side. You can see a huge reddish steel structure on rails down into the water that delivers the segments to the edge of the river.
Once the concrete segments of the dam are delivered, there is a huge catamaran (picture at left), which is supposed to be the largest crane in the world, that moves over the concrete segments and lifts them up to transport them to the dam. It all sounds complicated but still efficient like an assembly line. This may be true now, but the lock and dam were originally scheduled to have been completed over 10 years ago, and the new completion date is at least five years down the road. Along with the time delays, of course, there are HUGE cost over runs. When completed, the Olmsted Lock and Dam will replace two existing locks with dams, but for us today, we still had to transit those locks. Fortunately, the wickets were down at the first lock (#53) so we went right over the dam with hardly any notice, except for a little turbulence. The second dam (#52) was waiting for us as we arrived so with only an 8 foot lift, we transited through it pretty quickly.
We were slowed down to about 6.2 mph due to the current, which we had anticipated. This part of the Ohio River between Kentucky and Illinois is sparsely populated, except for Paducah, Kentucky near Lock #53 where we did pass under three very high fixed bridges. We passed this floating casino on the Illinois side. The hotel is up the back on the flood plain while the casino area was all floating with 2 large barges and the paddle wheel boat. I checked, and they did not have a drive through window for gambling so we did not stop...
One of the nicest surprises was to pass the stern wheel cruise ship, the Queen of the Mississippi.
It was quite a nostalgic view of the steamboat! However, since she was headed down stream (in the opposite direction), it was over all too quickly.
We did have an option of routes on today's trip. We could have turned off the Ohio River into the Tennessee River after 30.2 miles, or we could continue up river to turn off into the Cumberland River after about 42.1 miles. If we had chosen to go through the Kentucky Lock and Dam. This route would have been shorter, but if also has the most commercial traffic. Since the commercial traffic has priority over pleasure craft, we got what is evidently the Lock Master's standard answer of a minimum of a 2.5 hour wait. We opted to continue up river to the Cumberland River where there is much less commercial traffic.
The Cumberland River had very little traffic, and was pretty interesting. There were several large quarries where they shipped out barges loaded with gravel and sand. We have passed many quarries on the river system where they load sand and gravel onto the barges with conveyor belts. One quarry also shipped out large (1 to 2 foot size) rocks of the size that are used to "armor" the river banks against erosion. To load these large blocks of rock they used the large earth mover like trucks that would back out onto one of the three yellow ramps and simply dump the rocks directly into the barges. The ends of the ramps fold up when they are finished, like the one on the far right, so that the tow boats can push the barges out. You can barely see some very large piles of gravel in the background. Judging from the dust clouds, this must be very dirty work...
Once we entered the Cumberland River, it was about 31 miles to the Barkley Lock and Dam. The current in the river was slightly less so we did pick up about a half mile per hour. Sunset was approaching by the time we reached the dam at about 7:15 pm. The picture at the right shows our group of four boats entering the Barkley Lock as the sun was setting. Fortunately, the gates were open as a tow had just exited headed down stream. By the time we exited the lock the sun had fully set so we proceeded slowly for the last two miles to the marina. It was one of those dark (no moon) nights, but fortunately, we could see the larger buoys on radar, and even the smaller ones had reflective patches on them. We had plenty of help with lines from other Loopers, and we were finished docking by 8:15 pm. It was a very long day in beautiful weather with very pleasant company on the other three boats. I guess that we had dinner, but I really don't remember anything else until the next morning...
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