Goodbye Minnesota, Hello Iowa

On Saturday, September 12, with 60+ miles and 3 locks to cover to get to Lansing, IA, we'd hoped to get an early start from Winona, MN. Mother Nature had other plans. Cool air temperatures and warm water temperatures had combined to create a layer of fog over the river. I suppose we could have started cruising anyway and used our radar, but it was much less stressful to simply relax, enjoy another cup of coffee, and let the sun take care of the problem in relatively short order.

CARIB II on the Winona, MN riverfront. The sun
was already starting to burn off the fog by this point.

Aside from a few clouds and a cool breeze on Friday, September 11, we've had no complaints about the weather so far. It's been absolutely wonderful for cruising, and the bluffs of the Upper Mississippi are every bit as beautiful as we remember from last year.

Water, bluffs, and sunshine

We have been fortunate to get through locks (11 so far) without extensive waiting, "extensive" to us being more than an hour. Some of that has been luck, but in a couple of cases we made our own luck by speeding up to get to the locks before commercial tows. A tow with many barges can take 2-3 hours to transit a lock, so for us it is worth a few gallons of fuel if we can avoid a wait of that length.

This greeted us when we left Lock 9. We had to
exit by driving through the gap between the lock wall (the
yellow bit) and the barges

Our stops in the Iowa river towns to this point have been very different experiences than they were last year. On September 12 we were in Lansing, IA; on the 13th we were in Guttenberg, IA; and today-the 14th-we are in Dubuque, IA. All are towns where we previously stayed, so this time around we haven't felt the need to spend time sightseeing after we dock for the day. Of course, it could also be that the social opportunities with other boaters that have presented themselves in each of these places means that we haven't really had time for sightseeing even if we'd wanted to.

The end-of-season dock party at the Lansing Municipal
Marina. Very friendly folks invited us to join the festivities.

Three boating couples from the Dubuque area invited
 us to share docktails with them in Guttenberg

New "Loopers"-as of 7 days ago-Wes Parker and Becky
Holmes join us on CARIB II in Dubuque with . . .

. . . Loopers-in-Progress Becky and Mark Mather of Guttenberg, IA.
 Becky and Mark have completed about 3200 miles of the
Great Loop, but are not currently cruising.

Lest anyone think it's all fun and games, we have been dealing with occasional engine overheating the past few days due to a proliferation of algae and grass in this part of the river. The vegetation gets sucked into the raw water intake for the engine, clogging filters and reducing water flow. It doesn't take long for the overheat alarm to start sounding. If there's a silver lining, it's the anchoring practice we've been getting (twice so far) so that Lon can clean out the offending green stuff.

Grass and algae hanging out together. The light green
stuff on top is the algae

Summer seems to be back, at least for a few days, and we will enjoy it as we head tomorrow to Clinton, IA.