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First tows of year reach Hastings, opening river navigation season

The year's relatively mild winter allowed a timely start to the barge season.

By Kevin Duchschere

March 26, 2015 at 4:14AM

The Mary Evelyn, seen Tuesday, made its way out of Lock and Dam No. 2 at Hastings on Wednesday, moving 12 fertilizer barges to Pig’s Eye Island. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

The first towboats of the season cleared the Hastings lock Wednesday on the Mississippi River, heralding a more typical spring after unseasonably wintry weather in 2014 pushed the start of Upper Mississippi navigation into mid-April.

The New Dawn made its way out of Lock and Dam No. 2 at Hastings about 8 a.m., moving nine fertilizer barges to Pig's Eye Island opposite South St. Paul.

It was to be joined there later in the day by the Mary Evelyn with 12 more barges loaded with fertilizer.

The average date for the start of navigation is March 22, so this year's start wasn't far off the mark. The season for barge traffic typically extends until Thanksgiving, said Hokan Miller, a dispatcher for Upper River Services in St. Paul.

In between, as many as several hundred barges daily will ply the Upper Mississippi to moorings off downtown St. Paul, going as far upriver as the High Bridge.

"It's a great job if you like ice fishing and it's a bad job if you want to be in a softball league, because you're going to be busy," Miller said.

The earliest date for a northbound tow to reach the Hastings lock is March 4, which happened as recently as 2000. Last year it was April 16, the latest start since the major flooding of 2001.

It might have happened earlier this year, according to lockmaster Brian Gray of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but for the ice on Lake Pepin — at 12 inches, it was still pretty thick, he said — and routine maintenance work being done at Lock and Dam No. 5A at Fountain City, Wis.

The New Dawn and Mary Evelyn, both belonging to the American River Transportation Co., arrived at Lake Pepin Tuesday afternoon with about 31,500 tons of fertilizer.

Their barges were to be delivered to river docks starting Wednesday night, then washed and reloaded with 4,500 tons of corn and 4,500 tons of soybeans for the trip back downriver to St. Louis.

About 90 percent of the commodities shipped south from St. Paul are grains, with the balance largely made up of asphalt, potash and scrap metal.

Of the products shipped to St. Paul, about half are sand and gravel. Fertilizer makes up about a quarter of the shipments, followed by cement and salt.

The unofficial start of the navigation season on the Mississippi is considered a sign of spring in Minnesota, despite the blanket of snow that the Twin Cities received Tuesday night and early Wednesday.

Kevin Duchschere • 651-925-5035

The tug the Mary Evelyn, among the first to ply the waters during the opening of the shipping season on the Mississippi River in Minnesota, sits in Lock and Dam No. 2 Tuesday, March 25, 2015, near Hastings, MN. The first towboats of the 2015 shipping season are expected to arrive in St. Paul any day now. As of late Tuesday, the Mary Evelyn and the New Dawn were just south of Lake Pepin and breaking through ice while making their way north with more than 31,000 tons of dry fertilizer. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

about the writer

Kevin Duchschere

Team Leader

Kevin Duchschere, a metro team editor, has worked in the newsroom since 1986 as a general assignment reporter and has covered St. Paul City Hall, the Minnesota Legislature and Hennepin, Ramsey, Washington and Dakota counties. He was St. Paul bureau chief in 2005-07 and Suburbs team leader in 2015-20.