For a few more days we were River Rats.  We ended up traveling with seven boats (all Loopers). There are no marinas along this stretch so we had two anchorages with 7 boats.  One was Little Diversion canal, which we filled with all our boats and the other was Bean Branch creek (both on the Ohio)  From Bean Branch Creek we had two hurtles to clear, Olmstead Lock and Lock 52 but are know to have long waits.  The Lock Master at Olmstead said we should be on the river by 7am to have our shortest wait.  At 7am  Steve Lasher gets out his trumpet and plays Anchors Away.  at the end we all started our engines and you could hear the clackety clack of all the 7 anchors being pulled.  We were all under way as the sun rose.  Sun rises are just as pretty as sun sets.

The next two locks were not fun.  Olmstead we waited for 3 to 4 hours. It is a new lock that isn’t completed. All boats need to be escorted through. Seemed really ridiculous the way they are doing that. The saving grace in that lock was that it was cooler in the morning.  By the time we anchored it was close to 100 degrees.

Lock 52 we only waited a couple hours.  Luckily the lock master had pity on us and asked a smaller tow if we could tie up to his barge and lock through with him.  You could tell he wasn’t thrilled but 7 boats piled in, 6 tied to the barge (which was a first for all of them)  We had to be tied to a pretty rough oddly shaped wall but we all made it.  The dock hands on the barge were given fruit by one of the boats and in return they were exchanging boat cards running up and down the barges.

It was another 100 degree day.  We were pretty sweaty by the time we got done anchoring.

Our last lock before getting to our first Marina in a week was Barklay lock.  It was a huge lock 52 feet lift

.  We were all pleasure boats in the lock this time.  Funny thing happened in the lock.  Steve got out his Trumpet and played.  It echoed off the lock walls and was really beautiful.  When he finished we all cheered.  So he started playing again, when our radios went off.  It was the lock master asking if something is wrong . What’s that noise? One of the boats told him it was a trumpet.  He wasn’t amused.  He said to knock it off. He thought something was wrong. Hee hee

Just outside the lock was our destination Green Turtle bay.