Day 12 - some days you slay the dragon and some days the dragon slays you!

Miles cruised 46, fuel purchased $0, dockage fee $0

Our night anchored in the Mississippi River near Cairo, Illinois was uneventful. The winds died down and the gentle current kept us parallel to the river bank. We played our first board game of the trip – Rummikube which is similar Scrabble but using numbers instead of letters. Priscilla was the big winner.

We departed at 8:30 am and cruised the final 8 miles of the upper Mississippi River and turned left onto the Ohio River. Our down-bound speed of 12 mph turned into 6 mph going up-bound on the Ohio River. Now the current and a 20 mph head wind were working against us.
Barge traffic is extremely congested at the lower end of the Ohio River. There are massive islands of barges anchored in the middle of the river. Illinois is on one side of the Ohio River and Kentucky is on the other side.

We called Olmstead lock #53 and were escorted via radio through the channel that ran over the dam. A section of the dam had been removed to allow passage of river traffic. The Olmstead lock and dam has been under construction for a decade and is expected to be completed in 2020. After successfully navigating the narrow route the lock master congratulated us on slaying the dragon. We continued upriver another 20 miles and called lock #52. We had noticed a significant number of barges stuck to the river banks on both sides as we passed by. At 1:30 pm we were advised by the lock master that the wicket dam had been lowered on dam #52. That sounded like good news until she advised that due to extreme turbulence no traffic would be allowed through the lock until at least 6:00 pm that evening. It would be dark soon after we transited the dam and it is too dangerous to travel on the river at night. There are no marinas on this part of the river so we started looking for some place to tuck in along the river bank that is out of the barge traffic lanes. We read in our Skipper Bob’s cruising guide that there is a casino boat nearby. We continued up-bound until we found it. Tied to a giant concrete piling at the casino was the yacht Lady KK from Houston, Texas. Yesterday they called out to a tow boat to help them because their engine quit. They obviously were able to get repairs and traveled up-bound until they were also stuck below lock #52. The water around the casino was over 20′ deep which is deeper than we like to anchor. We cruised down-bound a short distance and found an area with 10′ of water and sheltered by trees from the wind and barges from the current and dropped our hook. We will spend the night here and try again in the morning. The commercial traffic should have cleared out over night. We slayed the dragon at lock #53 but were slayed by the dragon at lock #52. We are once again near a super hero legend’s home. Metropolis, Illinois has claimed ownership as the home of Superman and painted his image on the city water tank.

Carl (Chef) Wooden – Quote of the day:

Go small, go simple, go now
Larry Pardey, Cruising in “Seraffyn”

How far were you from the river?
The Ohio River sir? About 200 miles.
I went down that river when I was a kid. There`s a place in the river… I can`t remember…. must have been a gardenia plantation at one time. All wild and overgrown now, but about five miles you`d think that heaven just fell on the earth in the form of gardenias”
John Milius & Francis Ford Coppola. – Appocolypse Now

On Saturday we will transit one more lock on the Cumberland River which is the Barkley Lock and Dam before we get to Green Turtle Bay. We will have 17 miles remaining on the Ohio River and 32 miles on the Cumberland River.

There is massive construction on-going at the Olmsted lock and dam.

Channel marker defining the edge of the open section of the
Olmstead dam

Home sweet home – our anchorage below the railroad bridge near Metropolis, Illinois

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman