Still Safe in Grafton Harbor, Il....Again

The first photo shows me wading from the flooded parking lot at the marina to the ramp leading to the floating docks. The second photo is us at Muriel's brother's house in Perry, Ia. with her father. The third photo is looking down the Illinois River into the Mississippi showing whole trees and a lot of debris floating down the river due to the flooding. The next photo shows a tow headed downstream into a fog bank. The last photo is Shelly inside the top of the arch at St. Louis.

We have been here in Grafton for over a week now. We have been to St Louis to visit the arch and we drove to Iowa to visit Muriel's father. He is doing well and looking great. We got back to the boat last night, Saturday, about 8:oo pm. On the way back we stopped in Hannnibal, Mo., the home of Mark Twain, to look around. We did not spend much time there. From the information we get it sounds like we will be here for several more days.
We have heard that the marina at Alton, the next port downstream where about a dozen looper boats are stranded, has lost it's electrical system due to the flood and will not be able to repair it until the water receeds. This means they do not have electrical power, toilet or pump out or water or showers available. Glad we are here!

Muriel and some of the women went into Alton today to do some shopping. I spent most of the day cleaning on the boat, starting with the roof of the sundeck and coming down. I just cot a good start. I will continue tomorrow. It sounds now like we might start to move about Wednesday.

Tuesday, Sep. 23...The river has returned to a near normal level here at Grafton. We have started to see some pleasure boats out on the rivers, we can see both the Illinois and the Mississippi from our slip. We learned this afternoon that the Coast Guard will now allow pleasure boats to move down river. The Illinois above us is still closed and still at flood stage for much of its length. We do not know how the water above us in the Illinois will affect us here at the mouth of the river.

We plan to leave here Thursday around mid-day and move downstream about 20 miles to Alton, Ill. This will give us a chance to see for ourselves how the river is and get us 20 miles closer to Hoppies, the next stop for most boats. This will also give us another day to get feedback from other boats who will leave tomorrow and Thursday.

Our plan now is to spend about a week traveling from here to Green Turtle Bay at mile 31 on the Cumberland River. This will get us out of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and back into more cruiser friendly waters. From what we hear we will find spotty cell phone coverage from there to Mobile so our blog entries may skip more time between entries for a while.

We are all getting excited about moving again.