Lacey: Logs, Locks, and Beavers on the Great Loop

A repair before the river

A couple of days before Demian planned to leave Alton, the shaft seal in Lacey's steering pump failed. The steering pump is the hydraulic unit behind the wheel that pushes fluid to turn the rudder. A shaft seal is the ring that keeps that fluid from leaking out around the turning shaft.

He ordered parts to the marina office in Alton and rebuilt the pump himself on October 8 and 9, 2026, right on a sheet of cardboard in Lacey's cabin.

"Not a difficult job just messy," he says.

For someone whose day job at the Shipwrights is systems work, it was a familiar kind of problem, just with a river view.

On his last night in Alton, Demian couldn't leave without one more photo. He waited until dark, when the Clark Bridge was lit up overhead and Lacey's cabin glowed from inside, and got the shot.

With the pump back together, Lacey left Alton on October 11, 2026.

Photo captions: Lacey at the Alton Marina beneath the lit Clark Bridge, Demian on his way down the river

Logs, debris, and a lot of barges

That first day, Lacey covered 74.3 nautical miles, from Alton to an anchorage on the Kaskaskia River, and passed through two locks along the way.

Running down the Mississippi with the current was easy going. "It was very nice going with the current on the Mississippi River," Demian says.

The hard part was what the current carried. Between the Kaskaskia River and Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and again between Cape Girardeau and Angelo Towhead, the river was full of logs and floating debris. In a 28-foot wooden boat, that means keeping a constant watch ahead. Demian was grateful for the copper on the tip of Lacey's bow. It protects her stem, the solid wooden timber that forms the front edge of the hull, from the knocks of floating logs.

The Mississippi is also a working river. Towboats push long rafts of barges loaded with grain, coal, and sand, and traffic gets heavy near the confluence, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois. Demian found them easy to share the river with. "Very easy to work with though," he says. "I'm very comfortable talking on the radio."

On the evening of October 12, 2026, Lacey anchored in the Castor River Diversion Channel near Cape Girardeau, alongside a few other cruising boats.

Photo captions: Lacey at anchor near the Kaskaskia Lock and Dam, towboat Linda Little near the confluence, bow view heading toward a cable-stayed bridge on the Mississippi, sunset over the Castor River Diversion Channel anchorage.

A hammock at Angelo Towhead

A towhead is a small, low island in a river, usually covered in willows and cottonwoods. Angelo Towhead sits on the Mississippi just above Cairo, and its quiet back channel is a favorite anchorage for Loopers before they turn up the Ohio.

After the debris-filled miles getting there, it was the place where Demian finally got to slow down. That afternoon in his hammock is still his favorite moment of the trip.

Lacey anchored there on October 13, 2026. Asked what made that afternoon so good, Demian says, "I was far enough into the trip for it to feel like it was really happening at that point."

On October 14, 2026, Lacey pulled up anchor and left the Mississippi behind.

Photo caption: Angelo Towhead, seen past Lacey's wooden dinghy, with the bridge on the horizon, the anchorage at Angelo Towhead

Upstream, one lock at a time

At Cairo, Lacey turned upstream onto the Ohio River, and later onto the Cumberland. Running against the current was slower going, Demian says, but still fine.

"Lacey handles the river great," he says.

These rivers are tamed by locks and dams. A lock is a concrete chamber with gates at each end. A boat motors in, the gates close, and the water level rises or falls to match the river on the other side. For a small boat, that means sharing the chamber with whoever else is going through, sometimes a pleasure boat, sometimes a towboat and its barges.

"The locks have all been easy for me," Demian says. The longest he's had to wait at any of them was about an hour. Between Alton and Green Turtle Bay, Lacey went through four locks, according to Demian's log.

The debris didn't stay behind on the Mississippi. On October 17, 2026, in Livingston County, Kentucky, Lacey passed a toppled mooring cell piled with driftwood. Mooring cells are giant steel cylinders set in the river for barges to tie up to, and this one had been knocked flat. Barge traffic followed her onto the Cumberland, too.

Photo captions: mooring cells in Livingston County, Kentucky, towboat Charles Haun pushing a sand barge

On the Cumberland, the river turned quiet. Early on October 18, 2026, fog settled over Lacey's anchorage at Livingston Creek, and by that afternoon she was in the lock chamber.

Photo captions: Lacey at anchor in the fog, Port Townsend Shipwrights and PT Sails burgees flying, inside Barkley Lock near Kuttawa, Kentucky, looking past Lacey's bow at the lock gates.

A walk through Paducah

Along the Ohio, Lacey stopped in Paducah, Kentucky, from October 15 to 17, 2026, and it became Demian's favorite town of the trip so far.

"I really liked the city of Paducah," he says. "It was fun to walk around and look at the buildings."

Photo captions: Brick warehouses and storefronts in Paducah.

Nashville from the water

On October 19, 2026, Demian left Green Turtle Bay Resort & Marina in Grand Rivers, Kentucky, on a side trip up the Cumberland to Nashville, Tennessee. So far, he says, there have been "no big surprises yet."

The run up from Green Turtle Bay was an easy one. It took three days underway, with one lock along the way on the Cumberland. At anchor on the Cumberland, with the hills turning fall colors, Demian raised Lacey's sails for a photo shoot. The colorful sails were made for the trip by the sailmakers at PT Sails, a division of  Port Townsend Shipwrights, as part of his send-off from Port Townsend.

Photo caption: Lacey tied up at Green Turtle Bay Resort & Marina, Lacey at anchor on the Cumberland, the morning she reached Nashville

Lacey arrived in Nashville on the evening of October 21, 2026, and tied up at the Nashville Riverfront docks, right downtown.

Demian spent his day in the city the way a cruiser does: he went for a bike ride, stocked up on groceries, and listened to some live music.

Photo captions: Lacey at the dock beneath the bridge pier, downtown towers behind her, Nashville at night, Lacey at the downtown dock, the Nashville skyline lit up behind her.

Beavers at 3:30 a.m.

After a day off in Nashville, Demian took on 67.2 gallons of fuel on October 23, 2026, and started back down the Cumberland River, covering 43.6 nautical miles to Ashland City. The next day was a short one, 26.7 nautical miles to Clarksville, but a three-hour wait at the lock added an extra day to the return trip.

On October 25, he ran 45 nautical miles to an anchorage at the top end of Lake Barkley, and that's where the trip's most unexpected moment happened.

At 3:30 in the morning, Demian woke to a loud chewing sound. Beavers were gnawing on Lacey's hull. "It was loud because it was right next to my head," he says. “I got up to see what it was, just in time to watch them swim away.” It seems the sound of him moving around was enough to scare them off. Around 5:30, they came back for another try, and again they were already leaving by the time he got up. 

“Never crossed my mind that beavers might chew on the boat,” Demian says. As far as he can tell, the beavers left only cosmetic marks and no structural damage. It's not every day your wooden boat becomes someone's breakfast. 

Photo caption: Beaver marks on Lacey's bow and transom

Birds on the sandbars

After that excitement, the rest of October was quiet: down Lake Barkley, through the Barkley Canal, and up Kentucky Lake on the Tennessee River, anchoring each night at Moss Creek, Nolen Hollow, Rockport Landing, Beech Creek Landing, and Wolf Island.

The sandbars along Lake Barkley were full of birds, and Demian had his camera ready.  This was when Demian captured his favorite non-boat photos of the trip: birds gathered on a sandbar in Lake Barkley, taken with the boat underway and his 150–600mm lens zoomed all the way in.

On October 31, he made a short 14.8-nautical-mile run through one more lock to Pickwick Landing, Tennessee.

Lacey's log

From Demian's trip log, October 11 to 31, 2026:

A nautical mile is about 1.15 regular miles, so October's 713.3 nautical miles come to roughly 821 miles on the map. That brings Lacey to 732 nautical miles (about 842 miles) since launching in Saint Charles on October 2, with 14 nights at anchor along the way.

What's next

On November 1, 2026, Lacey moved into Pickwick Marina. From there, Demian will continue south toward the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway and the Gulf Coast, which he plans to reach around December, after hurricane season.

We'll share the next update from Demian in early December.

New to Lacey's story?

Follow the adventure from the beginning. Start with Lacey: Designed to Work, Bound for the Great Loop for her history and Demian's planned route.

Photos by Demian Detweiler.