October 6-7, 2017 Friday & Saturday
Friday: At the briefing yesterday Jeremy told us that the fall colors were beginning and it is true, we saw several beautiful trees today. We transited one lock today, Starved Rock Lock at mm 231.0 with a 17-foot drop. We were very lucky that we were able to transit within an hour of arriving at the lock, another pleasure craft had waited almost three hours and a tow was also waiting. We were pleasantly surprised that they let the three pleasure boats go before the tow. As we left the lock our beautiful morning of sunshine turned into an afternoon of rain.
We stopped at Hennepin, named after the explorer Louis Hennepin a Roman Catholic priest and missionary of the Franciscan Recollet order, for the evening. We had two options the public wall or the public dock, since the docks were shorter than Andiamo and bounced around we decided the wall would work better. In the rain, we spent about 30 minutes securing Andiamo to the wall only to decide that the extremely rough, high wall was not a good fit for Andiamo and we moved her to a slip on the docks where we spent a bouncy, but uneventful, night.
Saturday: No locks today but plenty of wind and waves. We had hoped to make it to Peoria but we only made it as far as Chillicothe on Upper Peoria Lake. As we pulled into Hamm’s Holiday Harbor Marina the wind was gusting to 30-mph, waves were building, and the rain began. However, once securely tied to the docks we spent a cozy evening on the boat planning our next 178.8 miles to the Mississippi River.
Trivia: When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway was building its mainline from Chicago to Kansas City in the 1800’s Chillicothe was selected as the crossing point on the Illinois River.
