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| Sometimes the water gets very high here. Those houses are at least two stories in the air. |
We slept well anchored out here on the Illinois at Devil's Elbow. Probably 5-6 tows went by through the night. They don't put out much wake as they are pretty slow moving but they run 24 hours a day with multiple crew and huge searchlights to see at night. Almost none of the marks are lit and they drive by the light of the search lights. You can usually feel or hear them coming before you see them. They have many thousands of horsepower pushing huge tows.
Almost first thing we met up with a dredge setting up to do some dredging and passed by them slowly. We had heard that the river was closed at mile 77 about another 20 miles downstream for here for dredging and we might not be able to get through for a few days. As we neared mile 77 we could hear on Channel 13 all of the tows discussing the closure. We passed about 13 tows with the barges pushed into the bank and the engines idling to keep them in place. Kinda how you park one of these monsters on the side of the river. The crews were out doing maintenance and painting waiting for the dredge to finish its work because they weren't going anywhere. We figured we wouldn't get past LaGrange lock just above mile 77 but when we called they told us to come on over and they would lock us through right away. The lock guys looked bored and they all came over to chat and ask about our trip, Abby and the motorcycle. We came out the other side and slowly went past all of the dredging equipment including a barge that was marked Accommodations and had probably 20 or more Motel like rooms for all of the personnel. After we passed the dredge there were at least another 15 barges waiting to go upstream. Supposedly this would take a day or so to clear the backlog. We felt very lucky not to be stuck in the backlog.
We were the second boat to tie up at Mel's for the night joining Thistle and then later Act III, Sandrobber and Loofah.
We all went to dinner at Mel's and enjoyed the house specialty beef brisket. They are also known for their desserts and all of us tried some kind of pie. There were about 15 choices all made in house.
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| The dredge working on the Channel |
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| The Dredge hard at work |
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| Another picture of Mel's. The restaurant flooded in 1994 then burnt down two years ago. But they came back and were busy tonight |
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| The water is low in the Illinois River |
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| Tough to tie your boat up here |
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| 13 Loopers in the lock |
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