You're sitting in the captain's chair at the helm of the HUCK FINN. You're looking North preparing to meet a 25 barge (5 across X 5 long) tow laden with coal. Thousands of tons of coal. Radio transmissions: "Downbound tow at mile 56, this is upbound pleasure vessel HUCK FINN."..."This is the Alice Hooker. Come back HUCK FINN"..."Good morning ,captain, what is your preference for a meeting?"..."Well, I think a one whistle would work fine, you keep the red side."..."Roger that. One whistle. HUCK FINN standing by channel 13."

So I make sure to meet this floating football field port to port, keeping it to my left side. There is no room for ambiguities or uncertainties in these brief but necessary exchanges. The massive tow can do almost nothing to change course in the brief time it will take for us to meet. This was an easy one--the river here was wide and straight. Sometimes the initial contact occurs at a bend when I cannot even see the tugboat, only the lead barges nosing around the bend. If it's a narrow bend, the choice of which side the vessels meet on can be critical. That's when you can rely on the great skill and experience of these tug captains to give you the best advice. It's good to know the rules of the river and to use all available resources to make the wisest decisions.
About 2AM at Hoppe's marina (I do suffer from insomnia). A sizeable tow is pushing upstream, North, its searchlight picking out familiar landmarks for the pilot. You can see the lights at the head of the tow, more than 600 feet ahead of the tug.

The miniscule HUCK is safely tied to one of the barges at Hoppe's, well out of the channel in which the tug navigates. Occasionally, briefly, the searchlight lands on the HUCK. Perhaps the captain is commenting to his mate what a strange looking little boat that is over there. But the light swings quickly back to more important targets--reflective buoys in the water, and charted markers on shore that most captains have memorized from repeated runs for years over the same stretches of river.
An uncanny bit of luck brought me to the same anchorage in Establishment Creek that I had used on a boat delivery just a few months earlier in April. The creek is on the Missouri side of the river just above St. Genevive. We got into the creek just at sundown and I shot this picture looking up the creek in the fading light. Dannel and I played Johnny Cash on the stereo system and sipped a rum and coke to celebrate a great run (37 miles against a 3mph current) and a great anchorage.

Topping it all off, a near full moon was rising over the big river on the other side of the boat. We both thought "it doesn't get any better than that." Moments to savor.