Captain's Log: Making Miles

St. Louis, as seen from Stinkpot. There's really no place to tie up along this stretch of River. The river is lined with industry, relics of industry—no marinas, no docks.

As I write these words, we are underway on the Mississippi River just south of Chester, Illinois, where we just weighed anchor and are working our way south. The river is on the low side: many of the anchorages we would be depending upon are not even viable for our nearly 5-foot draft.

Fair warning: this blog does not contain lots of scintillating details of exciting places we’ve been and things we’ve seen. We’ve seen a lot of often-lovely riverbank and eaten well aboard. The places we could go ashore along this stretch of the journey do not line up well with places where we can anchor or tie up Stinkpot, so we’ve been making miles and enjoying the river scenery as it goes by. This installment is a simple cruise log with some culinary exploration. Since Stacey had a realization some time recently that she forms memories around food, so I am trying to record what we eat and where to help jog the memory later on. There may not be crêpes suzette at the café outside the Louvre in this installment, but we've really enjoyed this mostly-quiet time aboard. 

We left Alton on the morning of Thursday, September 18th. We had to delay our departure to wait for the fuel dock to open at 8:30AM. At 8:40, we started engines and moved over to fuel up and pump out our waste tank. We took on 274 gallons of diesel at $3.81/gallon (with the looper discount). At about 10:20AM, we said our good-byes to our friend, Greg, the dockmaster in Alton and pointed downriver to lock through our last two locks we’d navigate through on the Upper Mississippi River: Mel Price Lock and Chain of Rocks Lock. We snuck past St. Louis and spent the night at anchor in a bend just outside the greens navigation buoys, dining aboard on pasta.

We knew where we were going Friday, and it was not to be a long day, so the impetus to get an early start was lacking—the Kaskaskia Lock permits overnighting on their outer lock wall and has a strong gravitational force for boaters coming through the area, and we were feeling it. Even if the wall were full of loopers, we could always anchor in the pool below the dam, so it seemed like a good, easy plan. Arriving at the lock at 2:30PM, I called the lock as we turned onto the Kaskaskia River. The lockmaster replied, and I asked about the wall. He informed me that no one can tie up or anchor nearby due to the dredging of the lock. I thanked him and we spun on our heel back into the Big Muddy, continuing south.

Scanning the river charts, I found few anchorages that seemed like they would provide us the needed overnight protection from commercial river traffic. I decided we’d just roll with it, and see where we ended up with around 4 hours of remaining daylight. It didn’t take long—perhaps another hour—and I spotted a place near Chester, Illinois where the reds along the left descending bank moved out into the middle of the river on a long straight stretch, and there appeared on the chart to be sufficient depth behind them for us to anchor. It looked good on paper, and even better once we left the channel and sounded out the area. We anchored for the night and enjoyed a grilled chicken dinner, courtesy of our new, snazzy electric grill.

As they say, once bitten, twice shy—Saturday morning we didn’t tarry. We were underway just after sunrise and began shuffling onward downriver. After a solid day’s run, we once again looked for a place to anchor and ended up “rolling our own” again—this time on the right side (referenced to the descending bank) of the river sheltered by a wing dam and some well-placed red buoys. For dinner, we enjoyed the leftover grilled chicken atop a tossed salad, turning in early for our last day on the mighty Mississippi.

Sunday morning, we weighed anchor with coffee in hand and made short work of running the river to Cairo, Illinois where we turned up the Ohio River against just under a knot of current. We locked up at Olmsted Lock in the mid-to-late afternoon, going from the low water that had been plaguing us since Chicago up to a well-managed pool level courtesy of a waterway whose source is not being impacted by drought! We meandered a few miles more upriver and dropped the hook for the evening near Sharps Bar, once again dining aboard on the pasta leftovers from Thursday night.

Monday we again got underway soon after coffee to continue our trudge upriver. We had been unsure of where we’d be stopping so we could fly to Maryland for the Annapolis Power Boat Show, but plans began coalescing. We would fly out of Nashville, Tennessee on October 1. This means we’re going to Nashville! I started planning our run up the Cumberland River. The shortest, busiest route is through the Kentucky Lock on the Tennessee River. We did that last time we came through here. We waited six or seven hours to lock through. I didn’t want a repeat of that. I called Barkley Lock and asked if they had a feel for the afternoon’s traffic—we wouldn’t be arriving much before 5:30PM. The lockmaster was very upfront with me that he had no idea, so rather than risk it, we anchored at the mouth of the Cumberland River behind Towhead Island to wait for first light. We again dined aboard on an appetizer selection I managed to pull from the pantry.

As planned, we were up with the sun on Tuesday, September 23 and quickly underway. Stacey brewed up some iced coffees and I pointed the bow up the Cumberland River. By 2PM we were locked through Barkley Lock with four other “looper” boats onto Lake Barkley. We were the only boat in the ad hoc fleet that deigned to continue on instead of docking at Green Turtle Bay Marina. We ultimately called it quits for the night in the very quiet Poplar Creek (Kuttawa, Kentucky) where I prepared country-style pork ribs (A.K.A. chunks of pork shoulder) served with beans and rice.

It had rained off and on since about 1PM, so even though this is the first stop in days where we could easily launch the dinghy and go ashore for a walk, it just doesn’t seem worth the trouble. This is a beautiful place to see from the water, and we are, for the moment, content with that. Nashville beckons….

Wednesday we awoke and did not rush to get underway precisely—the scenery had us both absorbing the place as much as we could while we made ready. At 8:05AM, we weighed anchor and continued upriver, anchoring for the day in another beautiful spot behind Dover Island in Dover, Tennessee where we enjoyed leftovers and bedded down early.

Thursday, we weighed anchor at 7:40AM and ran to the City Dock in Clarksville, TN. This was our first connection to land in days, and we made the most of it. I personally logged 8.5 miles of walking around that cute little berg. We ate our way around it too, taking in Hawaiian fare for lunch at Arapaap, cheesecake desserts at B’s Cheesecakes near the dock, dinner at the Blackhorse Pub & Brewery where we enjoyed a flatbread before walking a couple miles to satisfy one of Stacey’s cravings for a specific chain-restaurant appetizer that will go intentionally unnamed here.

Friday, we dropped lines to continue upriver just before 9AM, and locked through at Cheatham Lock a bit after noon. This was the unfortunate site of our lesson for the day. After locking up, as we were trying to come off the wall, Stacey attempted to repel the boat from the lock wall with a boat hook as she had the previous Stinkpot countless times. Our new steed is more than double the mass of our previous one, and this is an ill-advised method of undocking in a vessel so heavy. It’s really impossible to move the boat sideways against the wind without a bit of help from the engines. I had no idea she was attempting such a maneuver, and I put the boat in gear to use the engines to twist us off the lock wall, sending the boat hook through one of our beefy, bronze-laminated plate-glass windows on the starboard side. Fortunately, laminated glass doesn’t make a shattered mess the way conventional glass does, but it did have us putting our shoes on until we could get a vacuum out. Lesson learned—engines, not boat hooks. In deference to the curious, I was able to easily power off the wall, so it does work.

The day’s cruise ended soon thereafter on the dock of a nearby restaurant that was once a marina (and still promises such with its name), Riverview Restaurant & Marina in Ashland, TN. As dockage goes, it’s nothing ostentatious—no power or water—but the restaurant has good “bar fare,” and we enjoyed it so much that with a few days until our marina reservation in Nashville, we decided to stay another night—the only expected remuneration for the dockage is that we enjoy the restaurant. Challenge gratefully accepted! We were sorely tempted to stay a third night, but circumstances conspired against that.

We woke up on the morning of Sunday, September 28 to find a wet sole (floor) in our as-yet-unused, uncommissioned forward head. I investigated the source of the water and determined it to be the head itself. The bowl was completely full and the flushing water (sourced from the river) was siphoning in and spilling over because our holding tank was now completely full of river water. This meant that we had no working heads on the boat. With our dinner and overnight plans now dashed, we called the Commodore Yacht Club and asked to come in to pump out two days in advance of our reservation—a request that was granted. We got underway.

It was a short 11 or 12 mile hop, and by 11AM we were pumping out, and by noon we were docked at the end of C-dock on the t-head (we were moved to the end of B-dock for the last few days of our Nashville stay to make room for a boat that had more stringent power requirements than Stinkpot). This was to be our end destination for two weeks—week one would see us flying to Maryland to attend the Annapolis Power Boat Show, and week two we came back to attend to boat repairs, getting the air conditioning working properly (recharge one and replace the low pressure switch on the other) and replacement of our broken window. With the boat once again made whole, we began making preparations for our return downriver to Barkley Lake and ultimately our planned cruising on Kentucky Lake, but that’s another blog….