No big rush to leave this morning because we were only traveling 16 miles. We got underway about 10:15 with fairly heavy skies. You can see the haze in the pictures.
Spent part of the early morning talking to the other Looper boats. I thought we were all going to travel together but as we pulled by they were not ready to leave so out we went. The Mississippi was real quiet this morning. I did not see any tows on the river and only 2 other small pleasure craft.
It still is a pretty dramatic change from the Illinois River to the Mississippi River. The Mississippi has the sheer rock walls in this section and it is pretty wide. The water was calm and we did have a couple of Asian carp jump today but if I recall a lot of the actual action with the carp is over.
The Alton Marina is right downtown. You can see the bridge over the Mississippi in the photos and there is a casino just to the north of the marina. The local grocery store will provide transportation and there are harbor hosts at this marina.
The harbor hosts have a meeting every evening at 5:30 to pass on the information they have on the river and traveling it. They get their information based on feed back from previous Loopers who have traveled the area and then let them know how things were. They will provide transportation for the Loopers to a local restaurant for dinner after the meeting. Probably will be another good evening swapping stories.
We will move on to Hoppies tomorrow. There are 2 locks on the Mississippi that we need to go thru tomorrow. Then all the locks will be done with for a while.