Stats:
Ottawa to Peoria Lake, 9:00 - 6:00.
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| Holy Sunrise!! |
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It's hard to see, but this water
is DIRTY! This is looking down
the side of our boat into the water.
Notice the green slime and suds.
Kids were swimming in this!
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We (well, I) slept in and woke to the sound of others getting their boat ready to go. As we were rafted off of Danny and Susan's boat we had to get untied so they could leave. I whipped on my clothes, Jeff put a cup of coffee in my hand and with barely an ounce of it in my system we were in business. (I don't envy Jeff the task of having to get me out of bed each morning).
We came to our first lock just a short distance down the channel. Luckily, the lock was on it's way up and was able to take us in right away.
The landscape became much more rural today. We decided to stop mid-afternoon today and anchor, relax and smell the roses a bit. We found a good choice on Active Captain, our online travel guide, but with the low river levels we couldn't get in. It was too shallow. There was no where else to anchor so on we pressed, trying to find a safe place to park the boat for the night. We crossed paths with a cruiser going the other way and Danny (from Potest Fieri) hailed him on the VHF to ask for some local knowledge. It turns out he owned a small marina up the way and he just happened to have three slips available. Sometimes things just work out.
I still hadn't seen one of the Asian Carps, the invasive species that are being blocked from the Great Lakes. These fish LOVE to play in the wake of a boat and will jump out of the water, even to the point of crowds of them jumping up and sometimes landing on a boat. You can see it on you-tube. Incredible. I had been looking for at least one of them all day, to no avail. Just as we were pulling into the marina this evening, I was crouched down on the deck tying up a fender and one of them leaped up RIGHT beside me and scared the bejeebers out of me! We were eye to eye! Jeff said he heard me "squeal like a girl" and then a splash. At first he thought I had fallen in but it didn't take him long to figure it out.
So we are here, tied up to a dock in Lake Peoria, enjoying an evening of chatting with John from Sandpiper.
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| The geography is becoming much more rural. |
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| Starved Rock State Park |
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| Waiting to get into a lock |
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| Inside a lock |
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| Lots of fishermen along the shore. |
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| There are sandy shore on both sides of the Illinois River. |
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| There's still a few barges hanging around. To put things in scale, that is a thirty-two foot boat passing it. And that is not even a particularly large barge grouping. |
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| Lake Peoria, it was tempting to explore a bit but once you leave the channel it is only about a foot deep. |
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