My latest river column

When I was asked to write a personal column on this subject, I thought I had kept it really, really short. When I did a word count, it came out to around 950. I could have written five times that many. But the limit was around 600. Oh well.

M/V Nancy Sturgis

Yesterday morning I saw the M/V Nancy Sturgis passing Huntington. This was taken from Huntington looking over toward Bradrick, Ohio.

The white church is Defender United Methodist Church. I've been told the church bell came from the steamboat Defender. Which came first I don't know.

And here's the prop wash from the Sturgis, which was pushing 12 barges of stone loaded to 10 feet.

I guess it takes most if not all of what an 1,800-horsepower boat's got to push more than 20,000 tons of stone against the current.