Moving A 42ft Houseboat up the River - Part 1: Lansing, IA to La Crosse, WI.

Recently I helped move a houseboat up to the Twin Cities from Iowa. This isn't one of my own boats, I was just along as the "experienced" river pilot, because a growing up on an island in Alaska plus owning 500 terrible boats probably adds up to river pilot experience, right?

This is part one, the first day of the journey. We started in Lansing Iowa and went up the Mississippi River to La Crosse Wisconsin. We had hoped to get a little farther, but ran into a few delays and mechanical issues on the first day.

The boat is a 42ft Gibson houseboat built in the 1980s. It has a fiberglass hull and twin Crusader 270 engines. We have yet to determine top speed, we kept it around 10mph since this is probably the longest and hardest the engines have worked in years.