OCTOBER 2024 SUMMARY
The inland rivers are behind us!! Yay! The rivers were interesting in several ways. There is always hype on the Looper blogs, etc,- tales of horror and difficulty. This is typically focused on things like gigantic tows of up to 20 barges, debris in the rivers (logs, whole trees, chevrolets, you name it), ripping currents, swirling eddys, giant locks, oh my. We found the navigation to be straight forward. The tow masters, the few we encountered, were happy to talk to us, professional and polite (even if I failed to take a crash course in speaking southern). There was minimal flotsam and jetsam in the water and the locking was very easy. True, on a couple of occasions we were held up while tows were given their correct priority. The big river locks were actually incredibly easy to manage, with a single line on a floating bollard. I single- handed a few of them on the early morning departures. What surprised us the most was the stunning lack of signs of humanity along the rivers.