Wednesday, September 16, 2009

At 7:20 am we were having our coffee and cereal and saw our friends on Laura Lee and Get A Way going downriver. We pulled up the anchor and set out at 7:45 am. There was a nice northeasterly breeze with a little cloud cover that developed later in the day keeping us quite comfortable and cool as we floated down the river. We arrived at the LaGrange Lock and Dam shortly after 2 pm and saw the Laura Lee and Get A Way anchored in the pool above the lock. We learned that they’d been waiting for some repairs to be done and had been told it would be fixed “any time.” That was three hours ago. We dropped the hook and settled in for the wait. Gale and Lucy took the dinghy to shore and found some wonderful treasures along the beach. At 3 pm as they were heading back to Blue Heron we got the word to proceed to the lock. While in the lock, we were told that a “hunk” of concrete had fallen off the lock wall and had to be removed from the chamber. We could see the crumbling wall and were very glad that we weren’t in the lock at the time it happened!

There was no plan yet as to where we were going to anchor tonight because the guidebooks all said there were no good anchorages between the lock and McEvers Island, another 32 miles downstream. Get A Way and Laura Lee weren’t sure what they were going to do either, however, they travel faster than we do and said they would keep a lookout for a good spot. We got a call from Get A Way saying that they thought there might be a place to anchor around mile 68; however, when we arrived, we could see that there had been a lot of silting going on and it would not be a good place to be overnight. Evidently, our friends had made the same conclusion since they had not stopped. Gale studied the chart and saw that wing dams could be found beginning around mile 63. At mile 62 just above a railroad bridge, we checked out a spot near an “L” dam. We were able to get well out of the channel and still had nearly 9 feet of water depth next to a very nice sandbar. By then it was 6:30 pm and we enjoyed the rest of the evening in this quiet place. Great Anchorage!