Hot River

Hey, everyone. It has been some time since I've updated. Battery life and service are scarce again. We are on the stretch of river between Louisville, KY. and Evansville, IN. This a beautiful stretch, perhaps the nicest we have witnessed so far on the Ohio. It's beginning to seem as if we picked a rough summer to do this trip. The lack of rain and excessive heat is not making it easy. However, it will not deter us from reaching our goal of hitting salt water. According to CNN, this is the second worst drought in U.S. history; second only to the summer of 1934 (Dust Bowl Era). In Memphis, the Mississippi River is a mere three feet from record low, and the Army Corps of Engineers are looking to spend $7 million on dredging to keep the barge industry afloat (pardon the pun). It is amazing how much the Miss has fluctuated in the past year or so. Just last May, the river was 55 feet higher, and within just a foot of record high crest. The river was three miles wide in some spots where they had blown levees to save Cairo, IL. While on the subject of floods, the flood of the Ohio River in 1937 is worth mentioning. As we've passed through most of these river towns since Pittsburgh, we've seen flood marks with dates written beside them on old buildings, poles, bridges, rocks, etc.; 1937 being the highest. There others marked all along but didn't come close to the '37 mark.

The heat deserves a mention, as well. According o the Weather Channel on my phone it is 104 degrees right now but "feels like" 117. While we have actually gotten used to paddling in these temperatures, there has been little relief at night making sleeping extremely uncomfortable. Temps have been around 80 at night. This excessive heat is breaking records, as well. It has been the U.S.A.'s hottest recorded first half of a year. And if you go back to July of last year to now, it would be the warmest year on record. Good thing for us, we are surrounded by water. We are able to jump overboard whenever we feel it necessary. We can also choose how much clothing to wear during the day. Most of the deckhand working on the barges are wearing jeans, boots, hard hats, and life jackets over top of a shirt. This is most likely mandatory, and they cannot dive in the river as they please. The heat advisory is in effect until tomorrow night, for now.

We've talked with a fella who is a deckhand on a barge and he assured us we would be pleasantly surprised with the increase in current once we hit the Miss, even with the low waters. He also warned us that the scenery is awful down the Miss so we should take it in while we can. We've taken his advice. There have been a couple of good camp spots, as you can see from the pictures; Anderson Island being close to the best in this river. It is the picture of the red sky. I don't have a lot of pictures to share because the river has been uneventful lately. There are some pictures of a storm we endured from a pavilion just off the bank. Another picture shows a massive Asian Carp we found freshly killed by something, most likely a propellor. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Day 43 - 780 miles

Hey everyone, greetings from Louisville, KY.! We are actually camped 6 miles above Louisville on an island. The last time I posted i mentioned we were supposed to get a lot of rain. We, unfortunately, didn't get much of it directly but surrounding tributaries should help us. We were hoping to get poured on which, in turn, would speed up the current. We are, however, at the widest point in the river (over a mile) so we wouldn't notice the change in current anyway. We saw the American Queen on Thursday. She is a 418 ft. long steamboat built in 1995, costing around $65 million. She has 222 state rooms allowing 436 guests and 160 crew members. We were told the paddle wheel in the back still propels the boat but most of her maneuverability and speed comes from two diesel powered propellers. The following day we ran into another fellow who was traveling the river. After talking with him he mentioned he was a writer and was working on a piece exploring the Mississippi River basin. He had started in Coudersport, PA. In a kayak. He said he decided to get a boat with a motor once he ran into the Army Corps of Engineers' territory (I strongly recommend as well), which is what we saw him in just above Madison, Ind. His name is Paul Schneider if anyone is interested in checking out his books. Just before arriving in Madison we went under a large bridge that was under construction. They were replacing the old bridge using a method called "truss-sliding." The process involves building the new, 2,426 ft. long bridge on temporary piers next to the old piers, then demolishing the old bridge and "sliding" the new bridge onto the old piers. The bridge would only be closed a mere 10 days! We stopped in Madison and got a bite to eat but decided to stay at a camp ground across the river in Milton, Kentucky. Some friends from Pittsburgh were passing through on their way to Louisville and stopped in and joined us, as well. Everyone was awesome up there and showed us a good time and lots of hospitality. Thanks to everyone, especially Joe for letting us stay there and even setting us up with the extra trailer with AC! Thanks to Brian and Freebird for the good times, stories, and laughs. We said our goodbyes and hit the river again in the morning paddling through rain the rest of the day. When we stopped I decided to build a dry rack on the bottom of my canoe by lashing limbs together. It has worked great, and I should have done it a while ago. We passed Marble Hill Nuclear power plant in the morning which is an abandoned nuclear plant that was never finished due to shortage of funds. $2.5 billion was invested. There were also reports of poor construction. Fear of nuclear radiation leaks was high, as well, due to the disaster at Three Mile Island around this time. It's a big river right now but we're pushing on eager to hit the swift moving Miss. Groceries and a mop chop tomorrow!

Indiana

We're finally out of Ohio and into Indiana. In Lawrenceburg we passed the Hollywood Casino which has a riverboat with a passenger capacity of 9,000 guests and 4,400 gaming positions, including a World Poker Tour room. The next town was Rising Sun which also has a casino in town. Rising Sun looked like a nice place but also seemed like most other river towns we have come across, so we decided to paddle over to the Kentucky side and check out Rabbit Hash, KY, which was what seemed to be a small community frozen in time along side the river! It's an unincorporated hamlet that has had canine mayors since 1998. We stopped into the general store and met the locals who were extremely friendly and willing to tell us some history of the town. Terrie, the store owner, gave us coffee and showed us some interesting pictures of the horse-drawn ferry that used to cross the river. The horses would simply walk on a treadmill-like belt which powered the ferry. Before leaving, she gave us some shirts of their music festival that they have every year which sounded like it would be a great time. I hope to make it back there to spend some more time talking with everyone and hearing some stories. The river itself is still slow as ever. However, there is finally rain in the forecast! We're hoping we can get some current to give us a push. We should hit our first lock in 95 miles today. There is also a huge music festival in Louisville this weekend but it doesn't seem as though we're going to make it in time. Bring on the rain!

Cincinnati

Friday night we, two canoeists going 2 MPH mind you, got pulled over by DNR; Never mind all the drunkards open throttle all around us. However, they weren't unfriendly and only cost us some time. We saw another Bald Eagle later on that night. That's a total of 11 now on this trip. We survived the heat wave and reached our goal of hitting Cincinnati by Saturday. We were admiring the USS Nightmare just before the city, when we got stopped again! These guys were Ohio boat police though and were psyched on what we were doing. We told them our story and that we got stopped the night before. They did a quick vessel check so they could give us a vessel safety sticker in hopes of saving us the hassle of more stops in every city. They even gave us some candy bars, Gatorade, and other snacks, then sent us on our way. We got a hotel in the city and did some relaxing. Some could argue this is "cheating," but our bodies and clothes needed some cleaning seeing as we've only showered twice in over month and haven't done laundry at all. It was also 103 that day so we decided to stay on the Newport, KY side of the river to avoid traffic and steep banks on the Cincinnati side. A block up from where we stayed was the Southgate House. This historical site was the birthplace of the inventor of the Thompson sub machine gun, aka the "Tommy Gun." It is now a bar and concert venue that gives off an eerie feeling, such that a dimly lit, early nineteenth century home should. We left the city yesterday and are back at it with fresh arms!

Day 31- 601 miles

Hey everyone, I apologize for the lack of posts lately. As you know I'm doing these from my phone and service has been scarce since we hit Kentucky. I'll start from the top. We made it into Pt. Pleasant, WV late morning, due to being up all night from lots of coyotes howling and raccoons being themselves, and decided to walk around. The flood wall that wraps around the city had a massive painting portraying the land as it was when the natives lived there. We had to check out the infamous Mothman statue located in the city park. In 1966 locals started seeing what looked like a man with huge bat-like wings and bright red eyes. There were around 100 sightings in a year, then one day the main suspension bridge collapsed in the middle of rush hour killing all but a handful of people. The Mothman was never seen again in WV. There was a movie made about it with Richard Gere as the lead. Anyways, we snapped some pictures and paddled along. We came across another lock under construction. A boater we talked to a few miles up said he has waited 8 hours to get through but we got lucky and made it through in 2. We made our way to Huntington, WV, which is the second largest city in WV (after Charleston). The movie We Are Marshall was based on the school here. We hit the city shore, got cleaned up, and headed in town to do some exploring. We made it about 8 blocks in when we noticed a vicious looking storm approaching so we turned around and headed back, seeing as we hadn't set up our tents up yet and didn't want to get stuck in the rain. We made it about a block and the winds started coming fast. The gusts were tearing shingles and siding off, knocking trees over, and blowing dirt everywhere. We started running, worried all our stuff was being blown into the river. We had to jump over and dodge debris everywhere. We got poured on setting up our tents so we took an MRE to bed and called it a night. We've since learned that the storm went all the way to Jersey and killed some 26 people. We left in the a.m. and were in Kentucky in no time! The river was the nastiest we've seen yet. You could see oil floating on top of the water, glass all over the banks, and we even saw a dirty needle near were we made camp. The next day was another long and hot day. To give you an idea of how low the water is I took a picture of a chair in a tree along the bank; has to be 20ft up. We hit Sciotoville,OH just before another intense storm hit. We slept close to a huge railroad bridge and the lighting struck all around us. Constructed in 1916, it is still the largest riveted truss bridge in the U.S. We found more rope swings! The river was chaos on the 4th, as you can imagine, and it was over 100 degrees again. We made it into Maysville, KY, home of George Clooney by the way, and made camp, wandered the town, and watched an awesome fireworks display. We're hoping to make it to Cincinnati by Saturday but the heat warning is extended until that night so it may be rough. Index of 110 tomorrow. That's all for now!