Monday October 19, 2015
We left Grafton a few minutes after sunrise, and headed right into the sun! Hard to see anything with the sun in your eyes. On our port side were the magnificent limestone cliffs that tower over the river from Grafton to Alton. We zoomed through our first lock, then headed south, making a semi-circle around St Louis. The chain of rocks was a long, straight, boring canal that went on for miles. It ended at our last lock on the Mississippi. Yeah! No more locks until the Ohio River!!!
The famous song written about the 1904 world fair has you meeting in St Louis. However, you can’t meet anyone in St Louis if you are on a boat. There is literally no place to stop between Alton (north of the city) and Hoppies Marina (45 minute drive south of St Louis.)
We had the wind blowing up whitecaps from the south (against us) all day, yet we managed to average 8 knots for the 63 nautical mile trip from Grafton to Hoppies! That is the Mississippi current at work.
Hoppies is a great “character” marina. The marina was started in the 1930’s, and it is still very much a family business, on a bunch of very old barges tied to the shore. Normally Fern the harbor master presides over a briefing every afternoon. Fern’s husband Hoppy was in the hospital, so their daughter did the briefing. In a nutshell, she told us that there are only two safe anchorages between their marina and the mouth of the Ohio River. One 42 miles away, the other 110 miles away.
Our plan was to make it a two day trip to the 2nd anchorage.
Another sailboat pulled in with Matt driving solo. He asked if we could be buddy boats. Good idea!