Yesterday evening 3-4 fishing boats went past us to get to a fishing ground. Beth was looking out and saw an Asian Carp jump out of the water and into one of the boats. It was flopping all over inside the boat. Beth didn’t have a camera ready.
Our anchors were up and we were underway at 6:30 this morning. We were in the lead today. We traveled 50 miles in 4 hours, then turned into the Ohio River. We were finished with the Mississippi. Unfortunately, we go upstream on the Ohio, so we lost the current which had increased our speed. We dropped from going 12-13 mph to a measly 7-7.5 mph.
The left channel is the Mississippi River and the right is the Ohio River.
The first few miles of the Ohio River is a very big parking lot for barges and towboats. We now had Illinois on our left and Kentucky on our right.
We passed a lock under construction. It has been under construction at least since 2001 and we don’t know when it will be completed. One of the locks it is replacing was 1 mile later. It is a very old lock with wooden wickets. When the river is high the wickets are lowered and the boats drive right over them. When the river is low the wickets are raised to create a dam. A steam powered crane is used to raise the wickets and it takes a full day to raise the wickets.
When the wickets are up boats need to lock through using the chambers. The lock was in the 
process of setting up the wickets. We were able to get through before all of the wickets were up and in place.
There was much discussion today on the radio about where to anchor. Just like the Mississippi River, there are very few anchorages on the Ohio River, and no marinas.
At 4 p.m. we arrived at Lock 52 where we were told there would be about a 1 hour wait for us. While the others waited (nowhere to tie up, just going in circles), we took our boat over to check out a possible overnight anchorage. Darrell sounded the area between an underwater sandbar and land. It proved to be a little too shallow for an anchorage. So we continued to wait for the lock.
At 5 p.m. we checked with the Lockmaster and were told he had to lock through a northbound tow, a southbound tow and then he could lock our pleasure boats. It would be another 1 – 1 ½ hour. Since it took the last south bound tow a good 45 minutes to exit the lock (it was stuck in the lock because the water was so low) we didn’t have a lot of faith in the lockmasters prediction of when we could lock through. 4 of the 5 boats decided to anchor and spend the night just off channel of the river below the lock & dam. This wasn’t the place Darrell checked. The water was deeper and we had enough swing room to let out adequate anchor rode. The 5th boat (Passport) was going to wait to lock through and would continue in the dark. They were almost home and were anxious to get there.
We dropped anchor at 5:30. 94 miles in 11 hours. Remember yesterday? 109 miles in 9 ½ hours.
