On The River

Today is the day!  I spent a couple of hours transferring stuff to the boat, wondering if it would all fit. Amazingly it did, and then the boat had more of a homey feeling.  Before this I was more of a guest.

A fisherman named Conrad stopped, and we visited.  He advised caution on the river, but accepted that I was probably prepared.  He had grown upon the Allegheny, further north.  Like everyone I’ve met here, he had great affection for the rivers.

Yesterday at a street corner, a bald wirey  guy yelled to me, “Hey, where are you taking my boat!”, no doubt a Pennsylvania compliment.  At the boat ramp I met a couple of fishermen at 10:00AM who stayed there till 8:00PM.  Mike and Orlando. Orlando drives a cab, and Mike works for the same company, driving a tow truck which retrieves taxicabs.  They get in lots of accidents.  Mike and Orlando confirmed a sense I have of western Pennsylvania, that it a place stuck in an earlier time.  Most places mothers don’t advice their children to pursue a career of taxi driving.  I asked about competition from Uber, and he acknowledged it was brutal. He said the cabs survive on contract work.  Cabs work for hospitals and schools.  If a school kid is deemed too ill behaved for the school bus, the school provides a cab ride.  Every day.  Twice a day.  Not much incentive to behave on the bus.

Like many of the youngish men of the small sample I’ve seen here, Orlando smoked, drank beer and had a well established summer tan.  Modern health warnings haven’t made it to western
Pennsylvania.

Given their connection to an earlier era, both were notably cheerful, particularly because they were free to fish.  Their bait of choice was raw meat.  Orlando did best with raw pork dipped in water that held shrimp. They caught seven fish, and took home two large channel catfish.  Mike makes a great
catfish stew.
In addition to the risks of smoking, beer and sunburn, I would be concerned about eating this local fish, but stopped short of saying so.  Just upstream is a water treatment plant.  Reading about the river, I learned that there are 1300 points on the river where municipal sewage flows into the river when rainstorms overwhelm their treatment facilities.  At the same time, over a million people who live in towns along the river drink treated river water. 

A marina manager told me people shouldn’t swim in the river when it is muddy like today.  Better to
wait until it looks clear.

Once launched, I took the boat upstream to Pittsburgh, about 8 miles to the confluence at Fort Pitt.  

This meant going through my first lock.  The lock master was patient and cheerful. Ideally I should
have a 100 foot line.  I was instructed to tie one end to the bow cleat.  They lowered a line with a
brass hook, to bring my line up to the top.  It went through two fixed hooks, and back to the back of my boat, where I hold it.  As the boat rose, I take up the slack till we get to the top and the lock
opens.  The system worked pretty well.  I had to tie three lines to get 100 feet.

After a couple of bridges, on the north shore before the city,  is an unusual sight, a World War II submarine.  I had visited it yesterday.  My father was a WWII submarine officer.  When I was in kindergarten I clearly remember visiting a submarine like this one.  On Saturday mornings he’d check on his submarine, and take me along.  I would wait in the officers’ 

wardroom, a tight space with green vinyl (or whatever they used then) bench around a table.  The 

steward would feed me powder donuts.  The captain’s kid, feeling like royalty.
The sub, the Requin, was brought up the Mississippi floated between two pairs of barges.H

The top of the River is marked with a large fountain. I turned around and headed back through the lock to a marina where I will stay tonight.  I continue on the river in the morning.
7/29
After a day and a half I saw my first mosquito.  Do they take the weekend off?  At the marina, rabbits
scurried, and something splashed into the water off the dock.
I’m under weigh at 7:30, another beautiful day.  A still-water sunrise and a marina shower were a
great start. The river food program was oatmeal and coffee, things that can be made by boiling water
on my butane cooker.  A barge tow slowly made its way upstream.
Here the river is moving at only.5 mph. Now out of the city, there are occasional industrial or barge operations on the left shore. To the right, green hardwood hillside. Western Pennsylvania has had a lot of rain this year
 Yesterday there were many weekend speedboats.   Today I had the river to myself until I passed a rowing shells of the Pittsburgh Rowing Club.
End of day. It was a long hot day.  All went well till the last lock at New Cumberland.  The Army Corps has been doing multi year repairs. With two towboats ahead of me when they finally opened, I had a wait of least three hours in 88 degrees.  Fortunately there was a steady breeze. The breeze equaled the current, allowing me to shut off the engine and float in place.
Going on the river today made me think of the early colonial travelers. In the 1700’s, with great risk of Indian attack, the river was the safest way west.  At least you could see attackers coming. Another form of attack, told in many stories, was when an English speaker on the shore would beg for assistance, and then the travelers would be attacked.