Day 3 - Rolling down the River

Welcome to Day 3!  We left Hamm's at 7:15, fueled up, and then hit the river again by 8.  The Asian carp are jumping now, especially when the boat accelerates.  The river is as wide as a lake here but we have to be careful to stay between the channel markers as it gets very shallow quickly.  We see some homes on stilts.  We pass through downtown Peoria, home to Caterpillar and it is the largest town we have seen on the river since leaving Chicago.  There is lots of industry/shipping here and barges line both sides of the river.  We are able to "float" through the Peoria lock, so we did not need our large fenders.  This is the last lock on the Illinois River.

 

 

We are not encountering the small craft that we saw the last 2 days so we are able to travel faster - in fact, we decide to skip tying to the Logsdon Tug Service barge in Beardstown and travel on to Hardin, IL.  We travelled 150 miles today (10 hours!) but it was worth it as we had a nice meal at the Riverdock Restaurant, where we also docked for the night.

Today the river alternated between grain elevators and power plants, and very rustic stretches where we saw little but hawks, heron and seagulls.  We passed the Scotia, a 45 foot sailboat that the owners had crossed the Atlantic in!  They are sailing down to the Gulf, then on to South America (Bob Hamm told us about them this morning).

We pass a levee and farmland, then about 20 miles from Hardin, the landscape becomes more rolling.  We see a trawler, Granddad and Me, and they also stopped at Riverdock for the night.  We start to see more homes again along the river and a car ferry at Kampsville as there is no bridge across the river here.  There are several islands in the river as we get close to Hardin; one of the largest is Hurricane Island.  We arrive at Riverdock at 6:10 PM, tired and hungry, but happy with the time we made today.