3 Oct 17

It was another early wake-up call at 06:00. Unfortunately, when I called the Melvin Price Lock at 06:30, they advised that the lock, which is only 1.3 miles (or about 10 minutes) away, would be down for maintenance until 08:00. We got there at 08:00 and had to wait another hour before we finally got into the lock. Then, it was off to the races with 2 - 3 knots of fair current behind us, marred only by the 10 - 15 knot head wind (think short period, square waves, added to towboat wakes). We got through Lock 27 (also known as the Chain of Rocks Lock) without incident or significant delay, then rolled past St. Louis, with the iconic Gateway Arch. St. Louis was also barge fleeting central, so there were literally hundreds of barges along both banks of the river (and sometimes anchored right in the middle of the river), along with dozens of tugs gathering the barges into large tows, or breaking them up, or handing them over to big river tugs to go up or down the Mississippi or Missouri or Illinois, or getting them up to loading/unloading facilities. What we would call a target-rich environment. Anyway, it was not dull or boring. We finally made it into Hoppies Marine (which is no more than about 5 small barges tied up to the west bank of the river) at just after 14:00. There, we topped up the fuel tank and sat through Fern’s legendary briefing of conditions on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers between here and Green Turtle Bay; no real issues on the Mississippi, but the ~60 miles up the Ohio is going to be a bear, as we will be fighting the current, have two locks to negotiate, one of which is under construction, which has caused massive delays to commercial tows, which are anchored all over the place, screwing up the likely stops for us poor pleasure craft. Should be an interesting few days.

38-21.511’N, 090-21.618’W; Log = 30.6, Sum (2017) = 2471.6 N-m