We’re in Peoria! Or at least just outside, we plan to head to the official town dock this afternoon. Peoria is one of those towns with a magical musical name, like Weehawken, Schenectady, Paducah, Poughkeepsie. Maybe ordinarily we wouldn’t travel here just to say we’ve been, but since it’s on the route we’re excited to check it off the bucket list. More on that later, I hope.
Getting here has not been easy. Peoria is on the Illinois Waterway, a series of connecting rivers and canals that create a navigable route from Chicago and St. Louis, and ultimately to New Orleans. First step was to reverse the flow of the Chicago River, which used to flow into Lake Michigan along with all the trash and sewage that city residents dumped into the river. Now it goes the other way. That pretty amazing feat of engineering was completed in 1900.
The Waterway then traverses a series of 7 locks and dams over about 300 miles that bypass/tame stretches of rapids and help control water levels in the rivers and lake. We understand that 10 million tons of agricultural products and 4 millions tons of fertilizer are transported via barge along this waterway each year.
The locks, understandably, require occasional maintenance and repairs, and because they typically operate 24/7, repair work means a shutdown. NYC subway riders may understand. Two of them, Marseilles (that’s Mar-Sales) and Starved Rock, were completely closed from September 20 to October 13, and so everyone who would otherwise have been traveling downriver for the past 3-4 weeks is having to do it now. That primarily means a lot of barges, but it also means us and at least 70 other regular old boats who just want to head south for the winter.
To keep this from becoming a total sh*tshow, we volunteered to help organize some of these boats into groups and lead one group downriver. This is funny because we have never been here before and have really only been boating since July. And it means for the first time we are traveling with “buddy boats.”
At first the buddy boat thing was pretty great. After transiting the Chicago Lock that now separates the river from the lake, we traveled under a series of who knows how many bridges, right through the city of Chicago.
While waiting for Amtrak to go across one extra-low bridge that we needed raised up, we dropped off our passenger, Jillian, at the Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown. (We had an early start and she made it to work on time :)).
Since then we’ve been traveling through landscapes that just make me think, “America.” In places it's the kind of beautiful that swells your heart and mind – trees glowing golden green and yellow, undulating clouds, bald eagles flying overhead. In places it's the kind of ugly that you don’t want to think about but makes your day-to-day life possible – oil refineries, chemical plants, fertilizer factories.
As the head of the buddy boat parade, we had trawler- and catamaran-sized ducklings following behind us, which was adorable and comforting. Until we started to encounter the tows and the lockmasters. Being first in line, we had the job of contacting these people and basically asking them to pause their actual work of transporting who-knows-what up and down the river so that a bunch of random civilians can pass on by. Here’s what that looks like:
· Monitor the VHF radio: channel 13 (used by tows), 14 (used by locks), 16 (general vessel hailing and emergency channel) and 71 (chit-chat channel our group decided to use). We luckily have 2 radios, but even still this meant switching back and forth quite a bit. And of course the radios interfere with one another so to transmit you have to run one of them down to the back of the boat.
· Call out to the tows on 13: “Senator Stennis, Senator Stennis, this is pleasure craft Long Way Home, over.”
· Hope they bother to answer. (Senator Stennis did answer…thank you captain!).
· If they do, explain we are leading a group of PCs (pleasure craft) and ask if we can pass them “on the one whistle or the two whistle.”
· Translate in our heads what the heck this whistle thing actually means. (It’s the kind of thing you can only mess up once.).
· Switch to channel 71 and tell the rest of the group what we’re supposed to do.
OR:
· Call out to the lockmaster on 14: “Dresden Lock, Dresden Lock, this is pleasure craft Long Way Home.”
· Hope they bother to answer.
· If they do, explain we are leading a group of PCs and ask for instructions.
· Based on what they say, figure out where to stop and hang out for up to 4 hours or more while they lock through the more important traffic (i.e. the tows).
When we say tows – we mean a towboat (what we would normally call a tugboat, but apparently this is frowned upon because they are actually pushing, not pulling) along with a bunch of huge barges. So far the most barges we’ve seen pushed by one tow is 15, but we’ve heard that by Mississippi River standards a 15-barge tow is “cute.” We'll see about that soon.
Eventually when they let us into the lock, it’s often in between a tow that’s too big to fit in the lock all at once so the towboat has to drop off half the barges and then go back for more. To squeeze us all in, a couple of boats tie onto floating bollards and then the rest of us “raft” off – so far we’ve had as many as five across all tied together.
It’s so much fun!! Really. Our buddy boats have been phenomenal, particularly our friends on Salty Dog who came to our rescue when we accidentally ran aground trying to find a safe space to wait for the Marseilles Lock to be ready for us. And once we finally got into the lock, who should pull up behind us but No Schedule, a boat we haven’t seen since July that has a kid on it almost Felix’s age. The two of them jumped for joy when they saw each other and have been thoroughly enjoying youthful company for the past couple of days.
It’s also a bit too much community togetherness for some of us (ok, me). Yesterday we transited the last of the problematic locks (they were super-casual, “come on in, tie up wherever you want”) and hung out at a yacht club so the kids could finish watching Goosebumps (apparently there’s a movie).
But today – we venture out on our own once again.