Thursday September 10, 2021.
Temp: 83/53, Humidity: 34/100%, Top Wind: S19 mph, Precip: None- FOOOGGG!! then sunny, Miles Traveled: 54 in 7 hours, Number of Locks: 1, raised (Going UP River now) 10’
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I got up before the sun and looked outside. Just a bit of fog rising from the warm water. I received this nice photo of our Girl’s booty from Legacy, who was anchored behind us.
I sent them a picture of them at dawn, with the fog and bridge making it look mysterious. Some people complain about the noise of this bridge. We barely heard or noticed it. It wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the marinas that we’ve been in!
Soon Legacy pulled up their anchor and meandered out. Hmmm… we have a big lock in just about 23 miles, so we better get a move on so that we can go through it together. We don’t want to agrivate the lock tender by being a half hour apart and requesting two separate lifts (we’ll be going UP the Ohio River) if we can help it.
There was a big tow going upriver, just passing under the bridge. Captain didn’t see any other AIS activity out there, so it looked like a good time to go.
I got busy getting the weiner dog hose ready and preparing for departure. Captian started the engines, and nudged us forward bit by bit so that I could haul in the anchor chain. There was enough current that we needed to move the boat forward to take the tension off. The chain came up very clean! I was rinsing it, but I think the current was cleaning it as it came up through the moving water! We got to the pull on the anchor, and it was stuck really well, so Captain nudged forward and we sat for a few seconds to let it work its way out. I tried the windlass again, and she came right up, and really clean. There was only a bit of mud to rinse off. Sweet! By the time I got the bridle all put away and the anchor secured, we were turned around and headed out into the river.
As I was putting away the hose, Captian hollered down that he didn’t need any coffee, but he needed my eyeballs on deck – now! YIKES! The fog had settled in so thick that we couldn’t see the bridge! Oh dear! We finally found it so that we wouldn’t bonk into the pilings. What have we done coming out here?!
And the fog just got worse! Kenny was watching the chart plotter with the radar and AIS displayed, as well as showing our bunny trail for 2018. It was really, really stressful, particularly since we know that this area where the Ohio and Mississippi meet is a heavy traffic area for the tows. 😲. I was sitting up on the dashboard watching for logs in the water and listening for any signs or sounds of other boats. The really bad thing about a tow is that we might see him on the AIS… but that’s the TOW, not the length of the five barges out in front of him. Fortunately, we didn’t see anything moving on the AIS, so we kept creeping along. Creeping …. the throttles were all the way down at an idle, as slow as they can go, and we were still doing 8mph. There was quite a long time that we could only see about a boat length in front of us, based upon when we could see chunks of wood. Holy Foggyness, batman, this sucks! Yes – this is what it looked like!
After about seven miles, we knew there would be another bridge, but weren’t sure where the pilings would be. And we don’t want to trust our bunny trail THAT much, because sometimes it isn’t exactly right. (We’ve seen it go over land on the plotter, and we know we didn’t do that before!). Our heavenly Jesus answered my prayers and let us see the bridge breifly. It is actually a cool picture now that I look at it. 😏
And then the fog set back in, but we were only past bridge #2. All the while we’re thinking we shouldn’t have left our spot, and we didn’t want to go to the edge of the river and drop anchor anywhere, because this area of the Mississippi is actually very narrow (hence the swift current), and the tows need the space around the curves. Argh!
This picture actually shows more than I could see with my eyes. I could not see that ‘horizon’ line at all! Weird that the camera could see it. Of course, maybe it was my glasses. The fog was so dense and wet that my glasses were fogging over and I had to keep drying them off. Everything was wet from the moisture.
So, we weighed anchor at 6:30, and went under the first bridge at 6:45. Our second bridge was 6.5 miles downstream and we went under it at 7:30. We turned up the Ohio and kept praying for the fog to lift and for all of the tows to stay on the banks. Kenny could see all kinds of AIS signals and lots of blobs on the radar out in the river. We remembered that this is a big huge parking lot and tow transfer area. If we had not known that, we might not have been so stressed! But we knew this was a work area! This picture was at 7:50 when we were looking for bridge #3. We could start to see some shapes on the banks, and we could see the bridge pilings looking like giants in the fog with nothing visible above them. At least we could see them about a quarter of a mile away! YAY! This was better!
By the time we got to bridge #4, the fog was lifting and we were much relieved! I looked behind us, and there was still a lot of fog on the river, and we could see it over the hills to the right of us. Crazy! We had fog here in 2018 also, but nothing like this! And that was at mid-day. I wonder if it has to do with the varying river temperatures of where the Ohio and Mississippi join forces?
We were so very thankful to be able to see again! An hour and a half of virtual blindness and ony electronics to rely on was really hard on all of these old people’s nerves!! It’s one thing to run in fog on a lake or outside of a shipping channel. But to be where we know there are dozens of tows and barges was tough. Thankfully, it looked like they all stay put on the edges in the fog. Whew! They probably looked at their AIS and said – “Hey Frank – check this out. There’s a couple of idiot PC’s out there. Lord have mercy on em!”
We made it to the Olmsted lock by about 9:45. We heard Legacy call the lock and request a lift for two PC’s. That was nice of him, since he was a acouple of miles ahead of us. He slowed down and let us catch up. There was a downbound tow in the lock, but this Olmsted lock is awesome. It has TWO giant locks, so that traffic can go up and down at the same time. It took 30 years for this lock to be built, and it replaced two old locks (known as 52 & 53) on the Ohio River. We were invited to come right on in! YAY!
It really is a massive structure, and it cost $3 Billion!
We tootled in and caught ourselves a floating bollard. By the looks of the walls, we be going up about 10’.
There were dozens of big dead floating fish, and a bunch of wood debris in here. It was kinda stinky.
The lock and dam structures are huge. Do you notice the muddy water line right about the top of the man doors by the railing? Yep – the Ohio can run higher water than the locks.
This is looking back as we were exiting. Way over to the left, beyond the recognizable dam section, is the wicket section. The wickets are up, but you can’t really see them in this picture. The wickets are big cement walls, and when the water is high, the wickets can be dropped down to the riverbed so that marina traffic can freely flow across rather than use the lock. That is what we did in 2018.
Above the lock and dam, the water was soooo calm and peaceful. The sky was hazy but not foggy, and it turned out to be a really nice day!
We came upon the section of river where the old Lock 53 used to be. There is still work being done here to demolish and remove all of the underwater wickets and structures. It was crazy water here, and we remembered to watch our depth finder. The water depth went from 20’ deep to 115’ deep, then back to 20’. Where the wickets were had created a huge underwater turbulence and resulted in a big underwater canyon across the river. Weird how it still affects the surface. You can see how calm the water is up ahead beyond the old lock area.
This was one of the dredges. It just kind of looked like something from the movie Waterworld, with all of the stairways and stuff on it.
We got to the Paducah town docks much earlier than I planned. I figured we’d only get about 6.5 mph on the Ohio, but we were actually averaging about 8mph! That was really surprising! So we got all settled in and visited with the neighboring loopers. The boat Dream Weaver was still here, so we transfered their ladder to them that we brought from Alton. They were so appreciative that we were their personal parcel service. 😄
By about 4:00, I figured we should go explore a bit, so we got out the bikes and rode around a bit. We just ran out of Licor 43 for making Little Beers, so let’s go try a liquor store. Ha- what a hoot! We went to the nearest liquor store that we could find, and it was a drive-up/walk-up only kind of store. So we walked up to the window and the gentleman asked ‘What can I git fer y’all?” ..We asked for Licor 43.. “What?”.. It’s a liquor called Licor 43.. “Never heard of it.” ..OK, do you have any Triple Sec?.. “Whadat?”.. Triple Sec – it’s an orange flavored liquor used in mixed drinks and Margaritas. “Y’all aint from ‘round here, are ya.”.. Nope… 🙃. “Lemme look”…… “Dis it?”.. He holds up a dusty bottle of Hiram Walker Triple Sec. Yes! That’s it. “I wiped it down, it was a bit dusty. $10.” HA! I figure if we’da asked fer some Jim or Jack, there wounldn’ta been a issue. After all – we in the south now. And it is that obvious! The language has noticably changed in the last three days!
From there, we found ourselves at Paducah Beer Werks and tried a couple of beers. The bartender was really fun and informative. She majored in chemistry in college, and is actually an Executive Bourbon Steward. Who knew there was such a thing? A certified bourbon steward is like a wine sommelier. Only she was even one more step up with an Executive certification. Kenny had fun picking her brain about bourbon, while she served us beer.
It was a fun place, but kind of quiet on a Friday afternoon.
Their porter was pretty good. It wasn’t heavy, and they actually won a bronze award at a world beer competition in Europe with it! My mug kind of had a hard time containing it.
Laura the bartender recommended a barbeque place in town, so we went to check it out. It was about 6:30, and unfortunately they were already out of meat. 😢. Darn! That’s a sign of a good bbq joint. So instead, we heard some live music, so gravitated that direction. The music was a Broussard’s which is a cajun restaurant. I figured I could find something on the menu, and there was a lot of great selections that Kenny would have a hard time choosing from.
We ordered up a couple of swamp drinks and settled in to listen to the band. They played mostly 80’s stuff, so it was fun.
Our dinner was good and we always enjoy good live music! I had catfish, and was kind of disappointed. It seemed a bit mushy without much form. Maybe that’s normal for catfish. Kenny had some kind of crawfish etouffee that was spicy but tasty.
We took Speedy & Speedo home, and it didn’t take long before we crashed out to sleep with full bellies. We’ll be here again tomorrow, and we’re going to go eat some amazing steak tomorrow night. We already made a reservation for 5:30 dinner. 😋