Day 36 Continuing up the Mississippi River

     We pulled anchor and hit the road at 5:30 am for the 70 mile trek today. Sunrise was at about 5:55 am, and soon after we got on the river we were treated to the lovely view in the photo at the right. When I checked the river levels last night, it looked like we are past the crest of the high water moving down stream. This will probably not have an effect on the velocity of the river but just on the water level.





     Our trip today would be nearly 14 hours with an average speed of only 5.3 mph so I went ahead and increased the speed of the engines by about 100 rpm. I say "about" because we have only analog gauges that seem to bounce around quite a bit. We do have a handheld meter that I can point at the pulley on the front end of the crankshaft to get an accurate reading of the rpm. This means that I have to go down into the engine room to read the rpm. Then, if any adjustment is necessary, I need to climb back out and nudge one of the throttles at the lower helm station. Then I go back down and make another reading. I generally settle for +/- 25 rpm as sufficiently close. I am not sure, but based on past experience, this increase in rpm will result in an increase in speed of between 0.5 and 1.0 mph. This should have the significant effect of increasing the 5.3 mph average by that same amount. So, I am hopeful that this will cut an hour or more off of our travel time today. I had planned to do this on the Mississippi, especially if our average had been much lower than the 5.3 mph that we got yesterday. The down side of increasing the rpm is a reduction in the miles per gallon and a certain increase in wear and tear on the engines. I am not too worried about the engines since we are still running slightly below their designed cruising speed.

     We must have turned the corner because about 1/3 of the way on the route today the debris very abruptly thinned to almost nothing. I mentioned earlier that we should be nearly past the high water mark, and a reduction in debris would be logical if the water level was falling and therefore trapping debris on land as it falls. I suppose that we relaxed a bit from crisis mode to a more normal level of caution with the reduction in debris. The photo at the left shows what looks like an area of turbulence in the river. This is actually a channel marker that has so much debris caught on its anchor chain that it has been dragged under water. So, even though you can see no obvious debris on the surface anywhere in the photo it is still present.

     The photo at the right shows the screen of the chartplotter, and we (the boat icon in the center nearer the bottom) are somewhat on the outside of a bend. Yesterday, I talked about staying on the inside of a bend in the river to get in an area of reduced current. Our speed over the ground (upper left) is 3.7 mph. This includes the extra rpm on the engines, otherwise the speed would have been 3.2 mph or less. In this example, we were not able to stay on the inside of the bend due to very shallow water. A downside to reduced velocity on the inside of a bend is that as the velocity of a stream drops, deposition occurs that results in shallow water.

     The destination for today was the Kaskaskia Lock and Dam on the river of the same name. We are only about a quarter of a mile off the Mississippi River, but there is virtually no current below the dam.  The Admiral had called and gotten permission to tie to the lock receiving wall for the night.  It gave us access to a floating, concrete walkway about 1/8th of a mile long. 

     However, we did not have access to land across either the dam or the lock (photo at right).  The floating wall that we were moored to sticks out toward the bottom of the photo between the lock (left) and the dam (right). We dropped the Kayak, and Lucky and the Admiral headed to an RV park across from the lock. The park had a lot of open space and a nice boat ramp for easy landing and take off. The boat ramp is the light gray patch along the river in the lower left.  Lucky got lots of exercise and took care of business before coming back.  Lucky and I went on several walks on the floating pier and did enough "laps"  to get just over 1.5 miles.  I must have been really tired since I only managed to take photos of the sunset (photo on left above) and none of the overall setting that was quite nice. The photo was taken from the floating pier where we were moored and looks across the entrance to the lock that is just out of view to the right. As you can see from the nearly perfect reflection in the water, the air was very still.