Queen of the Mississippi. The only passenger boat we saw. Only two people at the rails. Business slow?

Except for a few turbulent areas almost like rapids, today was another peaceful trip at 11 to 12 mph with the engines almost coasting. We’re getting accustomed to enjoying the scenery and just relaxing. We passed a few downstream tows. Like us they were not pushing hard, letting the current do some of the work. The upstream tows were different. They were pushing as hard as they could against the current, whitewater from their prop wash boiling to the surface in waves as much as 500 feet behind them.

You can see the current. It reached 5 mph sometimes. We were flying.

After talking with Rayno last night we both decided to stop at Little River Diversion Canal off mile 49. If you’re looking for these places on Google maps it is “Castor River Diversion Canal”, then look east of that to where it meets the Mississippi. There is little or no current there, and what they have seems to run the other way sometimes, so a rear anchor is recommended.

Neither of us were set up to rear anchor conveniently, so I went in first, dropped anchor and backed out a ways and he went in after me, turned around and dropped his anchor a few hundred feet earlier. We both backed up and rafted to each other. Later two more boats came in and did the same thing closer to the channel exit. I guess they did not want to wrestle with a rear anchor either.

Still industrial. We saw no private boats except those we tied up with last night and anchored with tonight.

Its been awhile since we anchored, but it was really nice as evening came and everything was totally quiet in the canal. It was built in the early 1900’s so it has mature trees and looks like a normal small country river. We passed he town of Cape Girardeau is just a few miles north, but no noise or light pollution from it was evident. Anchoring is nice, but we’ve done it so little that I still get concerned about the anchor holding, and swinging around your anchor in these narrow channels could have us hitting the bank or other boats. I think it’s like all the other boating we’ve done. We’ll do it a few more times and get used to it.