October 17-19, 2022: Provisioning, laundry, and a great Loop briefing before another cruise south.
(continued from Joliet to Ottawa, IL.)
The very helpful dock crew at Heritage Harbor secured us to a long dock near the marina office. I’d paid for my space on Dockwa, so there wasn’t much else to do in the office. But we did get info about the facility, including its restrooms and showers and courtesy car. We’d been told about Harbormaster Jeremy’s Great Loop talk, but I didn’t want him to make a presentation just for us so I put it off that first day. Instead, we settled in for the night.
Here’s Do It Now at Heritage Harbor.
Onshore Chores
The next day, we requested and got the courtesy car very early. We had laundry to do — I’d been traveling for nearly two weeks, including my long drive from Washington State, and Janet had been with me for more than a week. We also needed groceries and a few more organizational items. Remember, at this point I’d spent less than 30 days total on the boat and only a week with a companion in the midship berth. Space was tight and organization was crucial.
The plan was to do laundry at a laundromat in Ottawa and then run over to nearby Peru where there was a Target and then back to Ottawa’s Walmart for the groceries. It meant keeping the car for quite a while, but with just three transient boats at the marina, there wasn’t much of a demand for it. We’d run our errands as quickly as we could.
And we did — or tried to. After doing the laundry with a quick trip to an excellent downtown Ottawa hardware store, we headed to Peru. It took 20 minutes on the freeway to get to Target and then it was a matter of wandering around the store to get what we needed. Janet’s bed was hard on her back and she wanted some sort of memory foam mattress topper. She was willing to take the 1 1/2 inch budget option but I thought she (and future guests) deserved better so I went with the 2 inch option that included its own cover. I bought a bunch of storage bins, covered and uncovered, to finish organizing the fridge and under-deck storage holds.
We stopped for lunch in Peru, at a Mexican restaurant near Target that had been recommended to us by the cashier at the hardware store. Janet and I had our doubts — how close was Illinois to Mexico? — but it turned out to be excellent home-cooked Mexican food, even better than some of the places I’d eaten in Arizona. Go figure.
The last stop was near the freeway in Ottawa, at the Walmart. For the record, I hate shopping in Walmart — I must have mentioned this elsewhere — but you can’t deny it has just about everything you might need at good prices. We bought what we knew we could store — enough fresh food for the next week or so — loaded it into the courtesy car, and headed back to the marina.
We’d been gone for more than 4 hours but no one seemed to mind. It was good to get so much done.
Jeremy’s Loop Briefing
If you’ve been on the Loop in this area or have read up about it, you probably know about Jeremy Fowler’s excellent Great Loop route briefing. Jeremy is the harbormaster at Heritage Harbor and he lives aboard a boat there. He’s also a boat Captain who has delivered (or rescued) more than a few boats between Ottawa and the Florida panhandle.
Jeremy set up the briefing for 4 PM and although I thought we’d all attend, it was just me, Kenny, and Rhonda. Janet didn’t seem interested and, for some reason, Kim and Ted didn’t come. (I later discovered that they didn’t know about it.) We sat in chairs in the marina’s store space with Jeremy up front. He had the Army Corps of Engineers chart book covering the parts of the Illinois, Mississippi, and Ohio Rivers that Loopers generally followed. Oddly enough, I had the same book, given to me by Captain Paul when he was clearing out old charts from his Loop, although mine was a slightly older edition. Jeremy used his extensively in the presentation and I was able to follow along. That’s when I realized that Paul had also sat through the briefing because it was full of his notes. (When asked, he told me he’d attended twice because it was so good.)
The briefing is vital to anyone new to the route. What I didn’t realize until that night was that we’d be pretty much required to anchor out at least one night along the way to the confluence with the Mississippi at Grafton — the long distance between Peoria’s City Dock and Mel’s Illinois River Restaurant where dockage was available had no marina options. This was true because with the water levels so low, some marinas along the way had to close because boats couldn’t get in. There was also a long, marina-less (and fuel-less) stretch between Hoppie’s, just south of Saint Louis on the Mississippi River and Paducah on the Ohio River.
At this point, I’d been taught how to anchor the boat but had never done it. And neither of my two previous Great Loop trips had included a single night at anchor. So I paid very close attention as Jeremy reviewed, on the charts, the anchorage options between Ottawa and Paducah, KY.
The briefing was incredibly detailed, not only reviewing the best anchorages but also providing information about how to enter them to avoid shallow water. This wasn’t a huge deal for me with Do It Now’s 30 inches of draft, but it was important for boats like Nine Lives, which needed five feet of water. And I couldn’t forget that the water levels were lower than normal so the charts might not be accurate.
The briefing went on for more than two hours. I took a lot of notes, most of which would be helpful later on. If you do the Loop, it’s worth stopping at Heritage Harbor just to attend Jeremy’s briefing. It should not be missed.
Cruising to Henry
The next morning, showered and with clean laundry and provisions, we were almost ready to move on. Pony left very early; if I recall correctly, they were going to meet up with La Principessa at the Ottawa free dock. Or maybe they just wanted to get through the next lock early. (It would be the last time I saw them for a long time, although I did stay in touch with Kim via text in the months to come.) I wanted fuel — I had decided to add fuel any time I was showing less than 100 gallons on board. I was also feeling a bit sluggish. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was beginning to show the signs of what would be a pretty bad cold.
Here’s Janet holding us against a floating bollard at Starved Rock Lock. By this point, she was a pro.
We didn’t leave the marina until after 10 AM. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of a wait at Starved Rock lock, about an hour downriver. We passed through and continued south.
It’s around this time that I started to realize why there isn’t very much written about the Inland Rivers part of the Great Loop: there’s not much to write about. The scenery is not very interesting — mostly the narrow river with trees along each side. Although it was a beautiful sunny day, it was wicked cold out, forcing us to drive from inside the boat. (My preferred helm station is on the command bridge because of the fresh air and visibility.) Maybe I was feeling the affects of my oncoming cold. In any case, I don’t have anything to report about this part of the trip. I’m sure we passed at least one tow along the way — it’s impossible not to on an average day — but have no details to share about it. All I have is a picture of from the helm inside the lock and a barge loading operation that we passed.
Here’s my view from inside the Starved Rock Lock lock chamber. Not very interesting, I’m afraid.
I think what fascinated me most about the way they loaded the barges is how unevenly the loading operation went. It wasn’t until the barge was full that it would level out in the water.
Arriving at Henry Harbor
It was a 5.3 hour cruise — per my engine’s running time — to get to Henry Harbor. This is a small marina in the town of Henry, IL that consists of two parts: an inner harbor protected from the river by walls and an old lock, now gateless, right on the river. Because the water levels were so low, they parked us inside that old lock.
At this point, my cold had become a real thing that was affecting my ability to do what I needed to do. I didn’t realize that, though. I came in to dock and it’s a good thing the dockmaster was there to grab our lines because I had trouble getting the boat stopped. In the end, we had to pull it into place. Then, when I got out onto the lock wall to chat with the dockmaster, one of my pups pooped just a few feet away and I didn’t even notice; Janet came to the rescue with a poop bag. I was out of it and didn’t even realize it until that happened.
With the boat secured and the dogs relieved, I went back inside. We had lunch and I lay down for a nap. I was out like a light within minutes.
Here’s my Nebo log for October 19, 2022. Download a PDF log file with more info. Track Do It Now on Nebo.
(continued in Henry to Peoria Heights, IL.)
