Day 95 Joliet to Ottawa, IL Wednesday August 22, 2018

The clouds left overnight and the air was chilly at 62 degrees in the morning.  Air warmed by the bright sun to the mid 70s. It was very breezy at times. Good time to be off the lake. A nice weather day

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Today was a long and tiring day. Three locks and about 49 miles. This would not have been so bad had we not had overheating issues with both engines. Will talk about it more below. The good thing was we had very little waiting at the locks - about as short a wait as I would every expect. So let's show some photos to highlight our travels.

Our day started at 5:30 and a call to the Branden Lock two miles below us. They said come down in 45 minutes. We left the wall at Joliet at 6:20 when we heard the draw bridge say he would open for a barge but had heavy traffic. He saw us leave the wall and held the bridge for us. This put us in position to move through the lock.

Approaching Branden Lock after tow has left.

 We were all by ourselves

Watch the bridge that is open

Just as we are leaving they lowered it to do some inspection. I had to lower my antenna - no small task - to get under it.

Barge traffic is heavy and confusing. But the AIS ship identification unit that I have that receives the AIS info (such as name, position, size, speed and direction) from other ships AND transmits my AIS info was more than helpful - I will highlight a case below.

But playing with all the barge traffic was not the most fun.

Approaching Dresden Lock - second of the day

Work going on the dam.

We were locked straight through with this towboat. (don't call them tugs as that is an insult)

While going down I noticed the bird houses in the shape of towboats on poles at the lock.

But when the towboat left he had to hook on to barges that were placed below the lock.

We got by him after a short while and sped up some. I thought the engines sounded loud - a sure indication that the intake are plugged like they were coming out of the Trent Severn. This means not enough cooling water getting to the engines. The tow and barges are now right behind me. We found a creek  of the one side and slid into it and anchored. We had 4 feet and the boat drafts 3.5 feet - but we were still floating. I was able to use the anchor wash hose to back-flush the under boat intakes and things were better - at least we could move at a speed that would generally keep us in front of the tows. But we traveled about 7 mph versus 10 -12 that I wanted to be doing. Thus the added hours to a long day.

The river is still industrial but there is ever increasing areas that are quite nice.

Remember the AIS I have. This barge is intentionally plowed into the outside embankment to hold the tug and tow in place while he waited for me to clear a narrow area of the river. He saw me coming and called to say he would hold the the left bank till I passed. Real nice!!

The last lock of the day - Marseilles (and not pronounced like it was french I might add)

We only had to wait a few minutes for the barge seen above to pull out.

 But this was waiting for us at the lower side - ominous but no problem really to get around.

 I saw this from a distance. My I Spy fans, what is it?  Hint - bet spring time water levels have something to do with it.

We did see some nice waterfowl and birds today - but I was too busy to take photos of many of them. Here is one of  a white stork  - I think - wading with the seagulls

It was 5:00 and we finally tied up in Ottawa - again all by ourselves.

 We decided it was a good night for eating out. Downtown starts right at the street I am on looking back at the boat.

 The streets seem to have a large number of active businesses - there are a number of restaurants included

 Interesting mural.

We decided to try the Lone Buffalo - it had a nice gathering of folks for mid week which is always a good sign.

The food was good and we enjoyed meeting our server Desire. She is a native of Ottawa and nice to see someone still enjoying their town. She was very interested in our trip and looked forward to following us on the blog. She enjoys the outdoors so we encouraged her to come some year to Maine and visit Acadia National Park for hiking and seeing the ocean. It is great to meet young folks that have a bright future and are fun to talk with - look at that smile!!

We took another route back to the boat - we passed thought church central - how many do you count I Spy fans?

 There are five!! Look close

As you can see the sun was going down on our walk back to the boat and it is down for another day now, so ........

Good Night and May God Bless