Cool video, as a kid living in Keokuk I watched the barges come through the locks but never saw it from the perspective of the captain. Thank you for sharing.
Keokuk was our stop point growing up to my grandparents place in Mercer County, Missouri from our residences in Piatt and Champaign Counties of Illinois even stopping to fish, watch the river barges and trains with Dad a few times (in the 1970s)
I mean that's really what it takes to work on a tow boat/push boat, if the whole crew works as a single unit then everything flows just like the rivers, but if someone's starts gettin screwy then the whole operation gets to being as tense as disarming a bomb especially goin through a lock
Man, this was fun! I grew up in Keokuk (till I was about ten, anyway) - and I used to play on those bluffs to the west, and I was over that old turntable bridge (on my bike and in my folks' car) prolly a thousand times. I used to tour the lock and the power house, whenever I could get down that way on my bike. (That was back in the day when a seven year-old kid could run all over a town of 16,000 without worrying about winding up, in pieces, in a chest freezer in some guy's basement. At any rate, this was a really cool (and well filmed) glide through lock 19! And you sure can handle that boat! Thanks for this unique view of Keokuk!
While I still lived in Iowa, there was a group of us that would take highway 99 south to Burlington, then cross the river and continue south on the Illinois side. We would cross back over at Keokuk over the old bridge with the expanded steel flooring. Full to look down from the bike and see the river below. And if a tow was coming, we loved to stop and watch the tow lock through. Quite a distance between pools!
Good Morning Captain, StreamTime LIVE is putting up a live stream camera here . CAN'T wait. Please step out a wave and toot your horn and blow us out of our chairs , I well be sure to say Hello from Canada, and so show us your beautiful Smile. It well be soon... they already have at Ft Madison on the trains ,bridge and the Mississippi River. It well be youtube thankyou Captain I so enjoy your videos
