Day 29: East Peoria to Illinois Riverdock Restaurant, IL

This was a long day. We left Eastport Marina across the river from Peoria, Illinois, at 6:42 in the morning.

The previous night we realized the air conditioning was not working from the shore power, so we ran the genset for a few hours (the heat was in the 90s) before shutting it off so we would not put a lot of hours on it. We also were without a depthsounder; it went out as we headed in to the dock at East Port Marina and never came on again. Also, the two Raymarine VHFs were not working properly today; fortunately we had an old handheld from West Marine. Handheld VHF with a good charge can be extremely useful on any boat of any size indeed. 

We also lost the chartplotter about 15 miles above Peoria; the chip only went that far.  Problems like this do occur on trips that are this long, so we recommend always having a paper chart handy. So we were navigating with George's 1992 Army Corps paper chart book, which showed maybe 8 miles a page, so we were turning pages all the time and, of course, was a bit dated. Overnight George had stayed up late to download Army Corps electronic charts to his laptop, so we wired the laptop into a small book-sized inverter that plugged into the 12-volt system on the dash. There were wires all over, but it worked. And, after all, we were on a river.

In any event, we had to wait more than three hours for a combination of a train bridge and two locks, and we passed a great number of barges and commercial traffic. For the last half of the day we had wind on the nose at 15 knots, but the boat ran fine.

We finally tied up at the Illinois Riverdock Restaurant Floating Dock in Hardin, Illinois, at 6:20. We had run 144 miles in almost 12 hours, a very long, frustrating day.