But wait, it gets better. So last night, I try and bribe the girl at the Illinois Valley Yacht Club to stay and help us pump fuel. No dice. I offer her $20 bucks to find someone to stay. Not happening. The fuel dock closes at 4:00pm and no one is willing to stay until 5:30 to help us fuel. However, she says that the dockmaster is willing to come down to the dock at 6:00am to fuel us up instead of the normal 8:00am opening. I figure that is a reasonable compromise and it will allow me to catch a few extra minutes of sleep. So at about 5 minutes to 6:00 we move the boat from our slip over to the fuel dock. As we are starting to tie off on the fuel dock, the dockmaster arrives. I'm impressed and thinking that we will be on our way pretty quickly. Boy was I wrong.
The fuel pumps are slow. I mean really slow. I mean I could have eaten an entire box of saltines and I could have spit in the fuel tanks and filled them up quicker than these fuel pumps. We started fueling at 6:00am promptly and we finished putting 417 gallons of fuel in the boat at 8:00am. Again, 2 frick'n hours to fuel the boat. Someone must hate me.
FINALLY, at 8:00am we start the engines and get underway. The sun is finally out and my teeth are not chattering, so all is well. That is until we get to the Marseilis Lock. We arrive at the Lock at 12:00 on the dot. The lockmaster says that it will be an hour and a half wait. No problem. That is not unreasonable and we only have to make about 150 miles today, so a short delay is not a problem. Except we waited 3 and a half hours to enter the lock. At 4:00pm, we finally emerged from the other side of the lock and got underway again. Now no one on board is happy. It is not likely at all we will meet our goal of getting to Chicago tonight.
But wait, it gets better. We run an hour to the next lock with the outside hope that we can still make it at dark to Chicago. At 5:00 on the nose we arrive at the Hardin Lock where we are told once again you will need to wait for commercial traffic. So we wait another hour and 45 minutes at the lock. At 6:45pm we emerge once again from the lock and get underway. By now we are spent, we are in need of some food and a cold beer, so we make our way to the nearest dock. Luckily the dock that is close also has a 5 star restaurant on site that has rave reviews from ActiveCaptain. The reviews were spot on. Big Fish Bar & Grill at Harborside Marina was just great! Actually worth the stop. Lemonade out of lemons again. Some things happen for a reason.
We only covered 109 miles today, but we made the best of the cards we were dealt. Tomorrow we only have about 50 miles to go and should make Chicago early where Mike's wife Lynn will join the voyage. Mike, Bob and Lin will continue the voyage on to the Detroit Yacht Club where Mike's new boat will call home. I will get off in Chicago and head to Toronto to pick up Dave's Meridian 441 and start heading to Pittsburgh. I will be right back through this same piece of water in just a few days.
At 8:30am the sun was out and we were finally underway. It was worth a picture after the start at the fuel pumps we had.
A very bad picture of a cool looking old paddle wheel boat.
Finally in our first lock.
Commercial traffic like this is what holds us up all day as they need to break apart the tows to get the into the lock.
Some other "pleasure craft" waiting to get into the lock.
Tied up at Harborside Marina as the sun is setting on another day on the Illinois River.
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