Welcome to the second day of this years adventure, but the fourteenth day overall. If you looked at yesterday's blog earlier today, I added several things to it when I got to an area with a better connection. I woke up at 6:00am, but wasn't able to resume travel on the river until 8:00. I passed by this tow boat and barges in the photo early, which became one of many I encountered today.
This is the river front park in Wheeling, West Virginia. It's a nice park, but my experince in the past is that there are a lot of people either drunk or mentally dusturbed hanging around. I wouldn't feel safe tying my boat to the dock and walking into town.
A Lowes on the river??? Yes, if you can figure a way up the river bank, Wheeling has a Lowes right on the edge of the river. It was a great place for me to pick up things I need for the trip.
One block from Lowes is Jebbia's Market, which is a great place for fresh fruits and vegatables.
Several hours after leaving Wheeling, I came to Moundsville. Like many of the smaller riverfront communities, they have a courtesy dock so boaters can tie up and go into town to shop. There was a Kroger store one and a half block from the dock, so I filled one of my three 2 gallon gas cans and got a few more food items.
This area is amoung the most narrow parts of the Ohio River. That narrowness, along with the winds accelerating due to the tall valleys, creates a lot of choppiness on the water surface. In this photo you can see what I was encountering for several hours. As you may have guessed, I spent much of the day soaking wet.
I'd heard on the radio that severe weather was predicted. However, it caught me off guard with rain rapidly approaching from two directions. I "beached" the boat and attempted to wait it out. WHen it let up a little bit, I continued on my way. But the rain came back again and again and again. It first started raining at 4:00. It's 10:00 in the evening as I write this and still hasn't let up.
I tied my boat up to a tree in one of the only places I could find along this part of the river. When i first tied up, there wasn't a creek next to my boat. But later I took this photo through the window and could see water rushing down the bank past my boat and into the river. Due to stopping today much earlier than planned, I only covered 36 miles. I'm tied up for the night at mile 121 across from the little community of Proctor, West Virginia.
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