Check out full day 277 post below
Daily Stats
Start: 6:45 AM - MM 301 - 8 miles south of Hannibal, MO
Finish 12:45 PM - MM 267
Time: 6:00 hours
Daily dist: 34 miles
Lock 24: 11:15-11:30 Portaged lock and dam
Total dist: 5400+
Companions: None
Weather: Mostly cloudy to overcast, 70’s, SE wind 5-10 mph
Notes: Showers threatened all day but it only rained an hour or so.
Daily Stats
Start: 6:45 AM - MM 301 - 8 miles south of Hannibal, MO
Finish 12:45 PM - MM 267
Time: 6:00 hours
Daily dist: 34 miles
Lock 24: 11:15-11:30 Portaged lock and dam
Total dist: 5400+
Companions: None
Weather: Mostly cloudy to overcast, 70’s, SE wind 5-10 mph
Notes: Showers threatened all day but it only rained an hour or so.
After a week and a half with apparently nothing to haul, the barge industry is back in action. Over the last two days I’ve seen more barge traffic than I had seen in the ten days prior. This traffic is resulting in bottlenecks at every lock. When I reached Lock 24 today (Lord knows what happened to Lock 23) two barges were waiting to lock through downstream while an upstream barge was already re-assembling himself after locking through. It didn’t matter to me because once again I was able to slide the Ikkuma, fully loaded, over the dry spillway on the far end of the dam. It took a little doing to round up the logs and sticks required to act as bumpers over the rocky embankment, but I was up, over, and back in the water in just fifteen minutes, faster than it takes to lock through even without a waiting line.
The weather man had been talking about a lot of rain on its way from the disintegrating hurricane that rolled into the Gulf last week. The sky was cloudy but thankfully, so far, all I’ve seen is a couple short showers. In fact the entire afternoon was dry and beautiful with a hint of sunshine even popping out just before sunset.
Not really sure why Jake wanted this pictrue in here... Any suggestions?
With a little more time at the end of the day’s paddling than I’m used to I was able to go for a walk along shore where I’m camped. I could only go about 100 yds in either direction until the sand ran out and became sticky mud, but along the way I did find an interesting animal tooth (looks like a molar from something big). I also took the time to clean up my kayak a bit. Weeks in tannic rivers had yellowed the normally bright white hull. The other day I had pulled the Ikkuma up on a mud beach for a break and before I launched I rubbed the sticky mud off the hull. In so doing I discovered that I’d rubbed some of the yellowing off the hull. Figuring it couldn’t hurt, today I rolled the Ikkuma up on its side and polished out the entire hull with Mississippi River mud. Incredibly the mud and a little elbow grease did a great job in making the kayak look presentable again. It seems like a silly thing to polish a boat in the midst of a 5000 mile trip, but wouldn’t it be a shame to come across the final finish line with a dirty boat.
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