FB page for UMR boaters

I've been looking for a place to find local knowledge from boaters on the upper Mis river, I couldn't find much so I started a group on Facebook to share what we know about our area that we are most familiar with. It can also be a place where if we have a problem we can help each other out when there is the need. If you are interested look for "Cruising The Upper Mississippi River"

Sounds like a great idea. I'm not a FB guy though. My son is and its been A source of great angst the last few years. Not to blame facebook though. I will get around to a visit and input when I have a chance. On the subject though, I have been over the stretch of river between the QC and the Twin Cities many, many times. I think I know the river, the backwater sloughs, the towns, the available services, stores and resturants well. Anybody in the area first deserves a welcome then I am available for whatever assistance I can offer.
Have you done your trip from Red wing to STL yet with the freinds boat? If not give me a shout before you pass thru the QC (mile 510 to mile 470) and I will help in anyway I can. If you happen to need dockage in the Mile 485 area (about 6 miles below L&D 14) there is probably free dockage available at the Isle of Capri Casino marina (where I dock) give me a call at 563.370.2242 ( I doubt I will get many crank calls from readers of this site)

I'm a FB survivor of about 7 years.

Now and then I "defriend" the people that wanted to be friends and never said anything. If they don't talk what's the point? Also those that have a high political or religious content.

I like to have a few cyber friends around the world. One can see a little about how people around the world live and what's important to them. The amazing thing is that I find people everywhere are really not that different. Or at least not as different as I imagined.

I posted all the pics of my trip south on Willy on FB just like I did here.

Capn Craig said:

...give me a call at 563.370.2242 ( I doubt I will get many crank calls from readers of this site)

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Craig(and others),

I am in complete agreement with your statement, having exchanged my phone number and personal email with lot's of folks here on TF. No members would dream of it, however members are not the only users of this or any website. "Web Scraping"(web harvesting or web data extraction) is a multi million dollar industry and they use programs commonly called "Bots" to do their dirty work. The following link will give a brief overview. Web scraping - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here is an instructional video detailing the ease of use of these "Bots" from a company that sells Web Scraping programs. Web Data Mining Software. Mine Web data and screen scraping from webpages using Automation Anywhere. Scroll downscreen a bit and click the arrow in the "Watch a flash demo. See how easy." area in the middle of the screen.

Mind you not all "Crawl Bots" or "Spiders" are bad, all the major search engines like Google use them. On-line gamer's have been using simple game play bots for many years too.

The problem is these technologies (variations of which are easily used by very young children for gaming) are being used by marketing companies(spammers) for much different purposes. After watching that demo video above imagine somebody in India working for a spam company in the data mining department with 300 of his closest friends spending 8 hours/day programming these things to run automatically to search for physical and email addresses and phone numbers. Rest assured, bots crawl this and every other page on the internet looking for data daily.

You won't get any crank calls from forum members, they will be telemarketers offering you services related to the "Upper - Mississippi - River" or something that has keywords related however loosely to the content of this site or thread. Exchanging personal contact information via PM is the safest way to avoid these intruders. The site team deals with spam and spammers more frequently than any of the members can imagine.

I never messed with computers or FB until a few years ago I got a iPhone for Christmas & my oldest daughter set up with email & later got me on FB. We have just about finished his boat, I think 1st half of August will be when we start down the river, I'll be sure & get in touch before we get to the QC area, thanks for the tip on a place to tie up for the night. Our pool is on the way down hope it stays that way.

Capn Craig said:

Sounds like a great idea. I'm not a FB guy though. My son is and its been A source of great angst the last few years. Not to blame facebook though. I will get around to a visit and input when I have a chance. On the subject though, I have been over the stretch of river between the QC and the Twin Cities many, many times. I think I know the river, the backwater sloughs, the towns, the available services, stores and resturants well. Anybody in the area first deserves a welcome then I am available for whatever assistance I can offer.
Have you done your trip from Red wing to STL yet with the freinds boat? If not give me a shout before you pass thru the QC (mile 510 to mile 470) and I will help in anyway I can. If you happen to need dockage in the Mile 485 area (about 6 miles below L&D 14) there is probably free dockage available at the Isle of Capri Casino marina (where I dock) give me a call at 563.370.2242 ( I doubt I will get many crank calls from readers of this site)

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We called the casino on a recent trip down the river, and they are no longer allowing tie ups

Lesterbranch said:

We called the casino on a recent trip down the river, and they are no longer allowing tie ups

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That'll save us some $$$

Lesterbranch said:

We called the casino on a recent trip down the river, and they are no longer allowing tie ups

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HUH??? Are we talking about the same place? Isle of Capri Bettendorf. The A dock 14 slips is nothing but Transients. In addition the outer dock has room for at least a half dozen more. They are more than willing to take anybody's money. I have rarely seen them full except for when the Dubuque Boat club comes down for the weekend and once or twice for the John Deere Classic PGA Tourney. They offer Shuttle buses from the casino to the course.

On our trip down we couldn't stay, the reason given was September 30th was the end of the season.

Go figure. My boat is still there and the power is on. But I do plan on pulling it on Monday or Tuesday. They did leave me with an unpleasant problem though, they turned off the holding tank pump out.

Capn Craig said:

Go figure. My boat is still there and the power is on. But I do plan on pulling it on Monday or Tuesday. They did leave me with an unpleasant problem though, they turned off the holding tank pump out.

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How about going down to Sunset for a pump out is their fuel dock still open? Any excuse for a boat ride is a good thing.

Why not just use active captain? It probably already has more info then we can hope to create on a facebook page. Plus it's all located on chart, integrated with charting programs, etc, etc, etc

twistedtree said:

Why not just use active captain? It probably already has more info then we can hope to create on a facebook page. Plus it's all located on chart, integrated with charting programs, etc, etc, etc

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Because probably 90%+ of the boaters on the river have never heard of Active Captain they also do most of their boating in their home pool with a occasional trip to a neighboring pool. Because of this type of boating most know their area very well, I'am talking about all kind of boaters the fishermen, the go fast boats, pontoons and the cruiser type, some pools even have a large number of sailboats. The combined local knowledge of these boaters is probably better than charts seeing as how a lot of areas off the channel change every year and on the river those are the places people anchor, beach their boat & play on the weekends. They're the ones that know when the corp places new wing dams & "training structures" or pump sand & create new islands. Most of them know where you can safely take your boat off the channel & that is probably the most important thing if your traveling on the river & not staying in marinas. I've heard of active captain but thought they were more geared to coastal & Great Lakes type boating, I would appreciate a link to see what active captain has for information on the river.

www.activecaptain.com

Sign up and check it out. It's free. I think the most important thing it provides over something like facebook or a web forum is that all the info is linked to a specific location. So you can put a mark on a chart that says "here's where you can leave the channel and anchor", or "here's an underwater obstruction that is not marked". You can view and access it via the web, but you can also use one of many charting programs on chart plotters as well as an iPad and take it with you in your boat. Then you can see exactly where you are relative to the marks. All the info others have marked is usable by you, and everything you mark is usable by everyone else. It's know as "crowd sourcing", i.e. a crowd of people (boaters) is the source of the information.

This is what I got when I clicked on the link, thanks for trying.

www.activecaptain.com

Sign up and check it out. It's free. I think the most important thing it provides over something like facebook or a web forum is that all the info is linked to a specific location. So you can put a mark on a chart that says "here's where you can leave the channel and anchor", or "here's an underwater obstruction that is not marked". You can view and access it via the web, but you can also use one of many charting programs on chart plotters as well as an iPad and take it with you in your boat. Then you can see exactly where you are relative to the marks. All the info others have marked is usable by you, and everything you mark is usable by everyone else. It's know as "crowd sourcing", i.e. a crowd of people (boaters) is the source of the information.

twistedtree said:

www.activecaptain.com Sign up and check it out. It's free. I think the most important thing it provides over something like facebook or a web forum is that all the info is linked to a specific location. So you can put a mark on a chart that says "here's where you can leave the channel and anchor", or "here's an underwater obstruction that is not marked". You can view and access it via the web, but you can also use one of many charting programs on chart plotters as well as an iPad and take it with you in your boat. Then you can see exactly where you are relative to the marks. All the info others have marked is usable by you, and everything you mark is usable by everyone else. It's know as "crowd sourcing", i.e. a crowd of people (boaters) is the source of the information.

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Thank you, I was a member but hadn't found it to be much use. Then I went back & created a eBoat card & did a search for groups, found a couple & joined also found some friends. I didn't find any group for the upper Mississippi so I created one, I think this will be a place for the cruisers who use Active Captain to share knowledge & possibly meet while out on the river. I've added the Garmin BlueChart app to my iPad & have tied my A/C account into the app. Here is a link to the upper Mississippi River group: http://www.eboatcards.com/upper-mississippi-river/

I was going to suggest activecaptain.com and specifically their Interactice Cruising Guide. I find it invaluable in my area and use it often to plan my cruises.

Out of curiosity I just checked the Active Captain Guide for UMR around and north of St Louis ... a lot of good info there.

Richard W said:

I was going to suggest activecaptain.com and specifically their Interactice Cruising Guide. I find it invaluable in my area and use it often to plan my cruises. Out of curiosity I just checked the Active Captain Guide for UMR around and north of St Louis ... a lot of good info there.

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Until I downloaded the Garmin app there wasn't any info on AC that I could find by going to their website. Now with the charts there is all kinds of info to tap into for planning a trip, I wish I would of had it when we brought a boat down in October. I went in & left some reviews on marinas that I know, I'am going to add some anchorages that I've used but only the ones that are easy to get to.