September 25, Day 104 - Henry's Island to Peoria

During the night, we would see the tugs on the river with their big spotlights illuminating the river banks. It was sort of “spooky”.

We awoke to small boat engine noise and stuck our heads out to see watermen pulling up nets full of Asian Carp. We tried to get a video of this, but it didn’t work out real well. Basically, they have these traps that look a lot like big minnow nets and they bait them with cotton seed millet. They are dressed in rubber fishing gear and it takes three guys to haul them out. It looked like they were catching between 30 and 50 carp per trap and they laid out two traps in a row. They separate the carp into “delicacy” and “pet food” and sell it to the fish markets. The dark, or black carp are considered a delicacy in Asia, while the silver ones are trash.

We ran into heavy rain right after we left the anchorage, but had an uneventful trip down the river. Peoria Lake was very shallow and the channel had a lot of twists and turns. Fortunately, we had no barges today, but we felt a bit naked without radar (the mast is still down – a couple more low bridges tomorrow).

As we were underway, if we noticed fish on the fish finder, we would look to the stern and watch the carp jump – amazing how they would leap out of the water right after we would pass over them. The boats behind us reported that they were hitting the side of their boats after we would “wake” them up.

After calling several marinas in Peoria, we decided on the National Marine Services Marina that was next to the Yacht Club. The water coming in was a little thin, but we all managed to make it in. This is a relatively new marina, so it wasn’t mentioned in several of the guidebooks (docks have only been in for 2 months). They only sell Gas, so we will have to top off our diesel tomorrow morning at the yacht club next door.

The owners are terrific folks who offered to take us to the grocery store and left us a Hummer to use if we needed anything else in town. What a country!!!!

We had happy hour aboard Second Star to celebrate Michael’s birthday. However, everyone was pretty tired so it was a much shorter celebration than the night before. After that it was back to the boat where we had a quick dinner and then off to bed. We plan to leave a little earlier than normal tomorrow because we have over 60 miles to go to our next anchorage. We have a few of these long days coming up because there isn’t much available for marinas or anchorages between here and the Mississippi.

There are many white pelicans in the area


You can just barely make out the three boats that are following us. It was very rainy.



Speaking of pelicans ..... how many can you count?