Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Lat 037 14 95; Long 089 31 20; Fuel 193 gallons; Engine 382.03
One of the things you have to watch out for when coming out of the Little River Diversion into the Mississippi River is barges. It would not be pretty if you went out of the Channel smack into a barge or worse yet a barge ran smack into you. Again the AIS was helpful since I could tell if a tow was coming down the river. They must have all decided to go to work at the same time because we had to wait for about 5 barges before we could reenter the river. As a safety precaution we did a securite just before entering and actually got a response from one that was coming just starting up on the downstream. The tow captains are really pretty good and nice people. One of them contacted me after we passed and asked where we were headed and I told him the whole story. He was interested because he was thinking about delivering boats for people that wanted to take them down south. I told him there was a market for that but I wasn’t sure where to find it. Another contacted me to ask if my boat was a Nordic Tug and we had a little bit of a discussion on the Tug.
We cruised down the Mississippi for about 48 miles and we had a decision to make – either pull over at the last possible anchoring site on the Mississippi or go into the Ohio River and cruise for another 30 miles. We decided get off the Mississippi with its current and move on to the Ohio River which flows into the Mississippi. Interesting thing, as we made the turn our speed over ground decreased dramatically because we were now going up current, and we have a lot more control over the boat. A lot of barge traffic on the Ohio also but not as large as those on the Mississippi.
We cruised a couple of more hours and then pulled over at mile 966 on the Ohio and anchored for the night. Nice and quiet. We had a little happy hour over at Serendipity and then we went back to our boats for the evening.