The office in Charleston is beside the Kanawha River. I keep looking for interesting boats to go by, but usually I'm disappointed. Today my luck was better. If only I'd brought my camera to work, it would have been excellent.
First, around noon, the D.A. Grimm came down the river pushing two loaded coal barges. The wind was blowing pretty hard, and the surface of the Kanawha was rough. Sometimes the splash that resulted from a barge hitting those wind-driven waves must have been ten feet high.
A little while later came the Charleston pushing six coal loads. It was followed sometime after by a smaller boat, perhaps the Reliant, pushing nine loads.
Any of those would have made a good photo, especially as they went under the Interstate 64 bridge. But my camera was back at home. Oh well.
So that got me thinking about photos of the Winfield Locks and Dam on the Kanawha that I had taken last fall on the day before Thanksgiving. It was a cold day, and I got my pictures and got out of there. This spring, when the air is warm and the hills are green, I'll go back and spend more time. Tomorrow I might post some of the photos from November.
Until then, here is a photo I shot that same day.
It's of the AEP Legacy during its first trip up the Ohio River to the AEP dock at Lakin, W.Va. But this was taken on the Kanawha, less than a mile above the mouth. The AEP Legacy has picked up some coal barges and is backing out of the Kanawha. When it got to the Ohio, it headed upriver. I had previously posted photos as it neared the Kyger Creek and Gavin power plants near Cheshire, Ohio.
