007: Cold Run to Peoria

 We awoke on 10/31/23 and was cold!

The good news was that the run to our next destination, Peoria, did not include any locks.   I had hoped to stay the night at the Peoria Boat Club, where we used to launch our Hobie Cats for races “back in the day.”   This is me showing off circa 1980:

Unfortunately, Sol Maria and Willie Dawes (pictured below, credit Kathy Murphy) drafted too much to fit into PBC with the river so low.  We opted for the free dock in downtown Peoria.  (Ok, free isn’t bad either!)  We were briefed that there was power available at the docs.  The ability to “plug in” for the night is a big bonus.   You can run a heater, stream to your heart’s content, etc. and not worry about running down your batteries.  (Hygge has four “house” batteries each of 100 amps, but due to the electro-chemistry of traditional batteries, all 400 amps is not usable.   Lithium batteries have more usable amperage, you can run them down lower, but putting in lithium batteries, which I considered, would have required some re-working of the boats charging system which I didn’t want to do before taking a one-year trip.)

 Willie Dawes

Sol Maria:

I was excited to get to Peoria to see the Caterpillar Visitor Center https://www.caterpillar.com/en/company/visitors-center.html  which was designed by my buddy Joe Maude’s Company: https://maudegroup.com/

Having no locks to go through we elected for a “late” start after topping of our fuel headed out at 9:00 am.   The trip down was going as planned, but then we got a message from KatMat that their engine was running hot, so they were slowing down a bit.  We offered to stay with them, but Matt said that they’d be fine, he just needed to pull into the next marina, let the engine cool a bit and top off with some anti-freeze.   We felt bad about “leaving a man behind,” but as you’ll see later, it would not be the last time.

We had a big southerly wind, on a river with a current from the north.  Not a great combination.   The southbound current meets the northbound wind, and you get choppy water.    Going through Peoria Lake (basically a wide spot in the river, where we used to race the Hobies) was not comfortable!  We were pounding into that chop.

We got to the free docks before 2:00pm, unfortunately the city had permanently decommissioned the power pedestals on the docks, so no plugging in to run our heater that night.   We waited for KatMat to come in, still hoping to get to the Visitor Center before they closed at 5:00pm.    They did get in about 3:35, but unbeknownst to me at the time, the last tickets sold are at 3:30pm, and so we missed our window of opportunity (next time Joe!) and had to suffice with the virtual tour:  https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=5wRFPRz1Yoh

 As the first snow flurries of the winter season started to come down, the crews of Hygge, KatMat and Willie Dawes had dinner at the Blue Duck Barbecue Tavern.    Here is Dan and Kathy Pease, with Dan looking exactly how I would cast a tugboat captain from Maine.

 

Back at the boat, I ran the generator so we could run our space heater for about an hour to warm up the boat before tucking in for the night.   This view wasn’t too bad to look at:

 

 Same bridge the next morning:

 

 

Dave