We began the day with Rich’s phone alarm playing “Good day sunshine” at 5:45 a.m. – never mind that the sun wouldn’t come up for another hour. We pulled out of the marina an hour later along with two other looper boats and headed south to Peoria. About 10 miles away was a lock, so one of the other boats had called before we left to see how much traffic there was. They were told that it would be busy all day so we should just come on down and the lockmaster would get us through whenever he could. When we were in sight of the lock we got a call from the lock that if we could get there in 5 minutes we could lock through immediately. Needless to say, we hit the throttle and got through in record time.

We were very close to the end of the lock!

Today we passed Peru – tomorrow we’ll pass Havana! We are world travelers and we didn’t have to leave Illinois.

We encountered a lot of fishermen today, many in small boats, but occasionally there would be a lot of them along the river bank. I’m not sure what kind of fish you find in the Illinois River, but I’m also not sure I would want to eat whatever you caught here.

This is what we mostly saw today – trees on both sides, not many houses, a few small towns.

Toward the right hand side of this photo on the little stream is an old dam built in the 1930s. The stream connected a small lake to the river. The locals claim that the wealthy people who lived on the lake didn’t like the river riff raff coming up to their  lake so they built a dam to keep them out.

An old lock no longer in use in Henry IL and a cool stone lighthouse about half a mile further on

Just like snowflakes, no two bridges look alike.

Along with fishermen, we also saw several large duck blinds.

We arrived at the Illinois Valley Yacht Club (IVY) about 3:15 and Rich very skillfully backed  us into our slip. As soon as we were secured the harbor master guided the next boat in our trio into the slip next to us – it was a tight fit!

Tomorrow we have another lock and an 80 mile day – all the way to Logsdon Tug Service in Beardstown.