September 26-28, 2026
Leaving Joilet, IL, we had a flotilla of looper boats together. We didn’t have to go far to get to the first lock. It didn’t take too long to get into the lock, but it did take awhile to get everyone settled. We had a commercial tow in front of us, and three boats “rafting” off of us with three behind us as well. The one problem with being a bigger boat is that the lock master typically puts us on the wall and the other boats attach to us. This means you have to have fenders on both sides and if they let the water out too quickly, you can get jostled. Thankfully, this lockage was uneventful, just time-consuming.
We had three other boats rafting off of us in the first lock.
We had a total of three locks on Saturday and stayed with our flotilla (sans the tow) the entire time. There were a number of folks heading to Heritage Harbor marina which meant when we got there, we waited to get docked. Once docked on the T-head, we took a lovely walk around the grounds. The marina has a nice restaurant, pool, pickle ball courts, and a great trail across the road.
Our friends, Scott and Amy had left their boat at Heritage Harbor on their trip to France for two weeks. They actually rented a “Le Boat” and did river canals. They had just got back the day we got there, so we hung out with them that evening.
There is definitely a routine to life and when you are in a marina with water and electricity, you do laundry! Yippee. Not glamorous, but it has to get done.
Bella and I had a lovely walk on Sunday on the Illinois Canal State trail. It went on for quite a distance. These are the nice aspects of being on the loop-nature, peaceful and I get exercise!
Sunday evening, Brice one of the managers, gave a good talk about what to expect on our trip down the Illinois, Mississippi and Ohio rivers. It was very detailed about marinas, anchorages, current, debris, etc. Unfortunately, he had a small Ipad which he was trying to show to a room full of loopers. He needed a large screen as much of what he was showing was not visible to the group. Anyway, it helped us get a better understanding of what was ahead. And here I was thinking that now that we were off Lake Michigan it was going to get easier-little did I know!
Ok, so brief story about the blog title. We left at 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning and Howie and I were the first ones out. Alas, not a good idea as that meant we were in the lead of about 8 boats. The fog started before we even got out of the marina. We were going about 7 knots, though a mile or two out, we were down to 3 knots. It took about an hour for the fog to lift. That was an eerie feeling being engulfed in the fog, not being able to see the boat behind us, and basically being at the mercy of nature. Needless to say, the radio chatter was busy that morning.
We were heading to Hennepin’s marina which was remote with essentially no services around it. Little did we know that this was the start of some really bad mojo.