Joe & Isaac's Adventure: Episode 2 - Chapter 2

We awoke on the morning of our second day to find the anchors holding fast. We drifted a few feet at most. After stowing away the tent and hauling the canoe back on board we headed for town. Louisiana is an old but tidy little town about sixty highway miles north of St. Louis. They have a nice little waterfront park with restrooms. We needed gas and decided to walk into town with our gas cans. We had brought along a luggage carrier with wheels for just this purpose. A couple of blocks into town we filled up our cans at Casey's and bought breakfast in the form of frozen sandwiches and burritos that we heated in the microwave.

Louisiana is an odd town. They have a number of small businesses, but nothing that I've seen on a sufficient scale to explain the town's economy. It could well be that small-farm agriculture is still a player in the town's economic health. My wife tells me Stark Bros. Nursery is located there and is big enough to influence the town's economy. The streets aren't choked with imported German cars, but the homes are well kept, the restaurants are open and people are out shopping. Louisiana does have one special feature. Louisiana has a bridge. It's the first place you can cross the river above St. Louis. Apart from Hannibal and Quincy there are no other bridges until the Iowa border. I said Louisiana was odd -- well it's the bridge that's the cause. Louisiana has a disproportionate amount of truck traffic rolling through town. At times it seems like every third vehicle is a truck. They all line up at the light in town by the bank like a caravan. It looks like Louisiana is being invaded.

There is no lock and dam number 23. Traveling up river, Lock 24 is at Clarksville followed by Lock 22 at Saverton. Why did the Corps skip 23? For the same reason that they built Lock 5A. Once they actually started installing the locks they realized a few modifications to the original plan were in order. The locks however had been constructed out of sequence and already numbered. It all works out in the end as there are 27 locks and the last one is Lock 27 at Granite City.

Leaving Louisiana we were headed for Lock 22. When we arrived there was, as usual, a tow in the lock. The lockmasters basically run one set of pleasure craft (PCs) through in between tows. Everything that isn't a tow is a PC. The tows take nearly two hours to lock-through and so arriving at a lock to find a tow already there means you wait. If you're lucky the tow is nearly through, if you're unlucky the tow is just starting. Tows on the upper river are limited in size by the size of the locks. Most tows are full-size which is fifteen barges. The barges are tied to the front of the tow three abreast in five rows. Only two of the locks in the system, those at Keokuk and Alton, are large enough to hold a full-size tow inside the lock. In these two locks a tow can be through in under thirty minutes. The other twenty-five locks however require the tows to split and lock-through in halves. To begin, the tow enters the lock and the forward nine barges are tied to the lock wall. Next the tow is split. The six barges nearest the tow stay with the boat as it backs out of the lock and clear of the gates. The lockmaster then closes the lock and lowers or raises the nine barges. With the far gates open the nine barges are winched forward along the outside wall until they are clear of the lock. Those gates are then closed and the lock is again filled or emptied. Now the tow with its remaining six barges can fit inside the lock. The lock is again emptied or filled, the far gates opened, and the tow moves out of the lock to meet its other half. The forward nine barges are reattached to the tow and the process is complete.

Traveling the river through central Missouri I was struck by how wild and untouched the river banks and surrounding countryside appeared. We traveled for many miles at a time without seeing a trace of human development. The locks and dams in this section of the river are much farther apart than in the upper half of the system. As a result the dam pools are further apart and the river contains much longer stretches of natural flow. The recreational boaters tend to keep to the dam pools and so the support structures like boat ramps, riverside parks and marinas are all concentrated near the dam pools. Much of the area that we were traveling through was designated as wildlife refuge. Unlike the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife Refuge that we were heading for, these were smaller often local wildlife areas such as the Ted Shanks Wildlife Management Area. The one exception is The Mark Twain National Wildlife Refuge which crosses state lines. It is not contiguous along the river but rather occurs in patches here and there throughout Missouri and Illinois. All together The Mark Twain National Wildlife Refuge accounts for a lot of land along the river. The vegetation at the riverbank was thick and lush. It was so thick in places that it appeared impenetrable. Before long my mind started to drift into fantasy -- there I was kicking the old boiler as we steamed along with thick jungle at the river's edge as far as you could see. If only I'd thought to bring along a bottle of Gordon's and a gal named Rosie.

Lock 21 at Quincy was also locking-through a tow when we arrived. By the time we got through and then found gas at one of Quincy's marinas it was getting late. This time we found a slough to pull into. It was directly across the river from Quincy and ran up the length of Conttonwood Island. I was much happier with this choice of a night anchorage since there was no current as there had been the night before. We slept with anticipation for tomorrow would take us across our first state line -- we were headed for Iowa.

On this trip Isaac and I passed through Locks number 4 through 25 inclusive twice -- 44 lockages. Typically we would arrive at a lock to find a tow in the lock and at least one other tow tied up and waiting its turn. Where the tow traffic is heaviest we encountered as many as six tows backed-up and waiting their turn to lock-through. To lock six tows takes an entire day. One of the lockmasters told me it costs $500.00 an hour to operate a full-sized tow. If that's true and I can see how it would be, then, based on what we saw, the delay at the more congested locks was wasting approximately $35,000.00 every 24 hours. That's a lot of money to spend twiddling your thumbs while waiting your turn. In fact that's $6,000,000.00 a year (tows run half the year) and that's just for one lock. We saw more than one lock with six tows waiting in line. If you re-run the numbers with just two tows backed-up at a lock and assume a two tow back up for twenty of the locks (very conservative), you wind up with a yearly waste of $55,000,000.00. It's easy to understand why the tow companies and those who use their services are lobbying to have some of the more congested locks expanded.

In the set of photos below the tow Brimstone is northbound with a load of coal. She's locking-through at Dubuque with twelve barges. In the photo on your left the tow has already moved six barges into the lock, split off those barges and backed out clear of the downriver gates. The gates as you can see have begun to close. The six barges in the lock will be raised and then winched forward out of the lock. In the second photo you can see the front six barges pulled forward of the upriver gates and the tow with the remaining six barges moved into the lock. The downriver gates are closing. Once the tow has been lifted in the lock the upriver gates will be opened and the tow will reconnect with its front six barges.