Friday, February 17, 2017

Second best

Sometimes you get there ten minutes too late to get the picture you want, leaving you only a few minutes to figure out what would be second best. That's what happened to me this evening.


That's the M/V Galveston Bay heading down the river past Huntington WV and the M/V Hoosier State heading up the river.

91 boats on the river

This morning before I settled down to doing some serious stuff, I wondered how many boats are on the Ohio River and how many of them I had seen.

There are 981.5 miles of Ohio River. Most boats travel large parts of it, but there are some that are assigned to particular facilities such as power plants, and there are some that stick pretty close to home. It's unlikely I have seen boats that spend their days in, say, the Paducah harbor, so I needed to limit my search to something I didn't want to spend all day on.

Thus, I figured I would count the boats I could find on the Ohio River here in my home range of the Huntington District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. That's about 311 miles of river from the Captain Anthony Meldahl Locks and Dam near Cincinnati to the Hannibal Locks and Dam at New Martinsville, W.Va.

That section of river has eight pools. Following are the pools, the number of boats on each this morning (as best I could count), the number I have not photographed and their names. I could be wrong on some of these, as they may have had different names when I got them a few years ago, but I'm going with what's on the nameboard now. And I may have gotten their photos once but have forgotten since. If so, please forgive me.

Meldahl: 17 boats, 5 not photographed. Jenny Ann, City of Maysville, Janet Elaine, Christine B, Mary Alice Baker.

Greenup: 30 boats, 4 not photographed. Ed McLaughlin, Sue Chappell, Energy, J.C. Thomas.

Robert C. Byrd: 18 boats, 3 not photographed. Penny P, Fred R.Shedd, Mr. King.

Racine: 6 boats, 2 not photographed. Dale Taylor, Vulcan.

Belleville: 15 boats, 3 not photographed. Austin Cole, Loretta G, Cenac, Dirk Taylor.

Willow Island: 5 boats, 2 not photographed. Roy F. Stevens, Quaker State.

So out of 91 boats, that's 72 boats I have pictures of and 19 that I don't. But there's still a lot of river left.