Sightings

Just to list some of our observations or reports from other loopers:

• Jack's boat, 'After Midnight' was seen at Hoppies marina, fueling up on the way down to Tenn.  The new owners live in Atlanta, 1.5 h away from the Tenn mooring;  they are having a captain bring the boat down.
• We're now docked next to "The Professor and Maryann" (from the 300 dock in Michigan City).  The new owners (of 8 weeks) are from Portsmouth, NH.  They are now snow birds and are taking the boat down to Florida to be their winter condo - it's not clear if they will ever go back to the north country (remember the snow reports from Boston over the past couple of years).
• We kept track of the size of the barges on the rivers.  On the Illinois waterway the largest was a 20 barge tow (4 wide X 5 long);  on the Mississippi we saw one that was 35 barges (5 wide X 7 long).  The towboats pushing these up river are huge; one had 3 power plants and screws.  The thrust wake can be 5 ft high and the wash pushes you around for about 0.25 miles.
• The Mississippi R gave us a great push going down stream, the current was generally 3- 4 mph but at one point we got a 5.9 mph push!  In places the river looks like it is boiling;  there are whirl pools being sucked down (4-6 ft in diameter) and large thrust upwards (15-20 dia) raising the boat 4-6 inches and turning us back and forth.  There is no way we'll turn this boat around and go upstream - especially in the Spring as originally planned.
• Nature's displays have varied with each section.  We saw blue herons all along the upper Ill waterway - including both those that were 'blue' and many that were in a 'white' stage of their plumage.  As we noted before, we saw large flocks of white pelicans around Peoria;  they are smaller than the brown ones you see in Florida and they have black tips on their wings.  We've seen lots and lots of black eagles but the highlight was seeing an American Bald Eagle at the mouth of the Cumberland River.
• The Asian Carp are present but nothing like the videos you've seen online; but one of the Loopers traveling with us said he had one land in his dinghy as it was being dragged behind his boat (that's the one who had his hanging davit break off in a barge wake).  Locals say that the population has seemed to subside.  Maybe all those pelicans and eagles are keeping them in check.
• The foliage is in full bloom here in KY.