When Cowboy Jim got on board, he seemed a whole different person to the one we’d met the day before. He was, however, just as endearing.

Before continuing our journey further south, we decided not to tempt fate and repeat the problems of the previous day. It was obvious that the power of the steam engine would no longer be sufficient when the current and conditions were inevitably going to get tougher. Moreover, the electric motor was no longer of any help, as the system that we’d devised for recharging the batteries was past it. It was a bet we’d taken and lost. We thus went to the only store that was likely to sell a heat engine, which we were going to install to ensure our navigation. At the time we had no idea how necessary this modification was going to be.

We went to Spark Sport in Prairie-du-Chien, a store dedicated to hunting, fishing but also strong spirits, judging from the huge collection of bottles of bourbon, whiskey and other spirits that were curiously located in the same department as guns. There the manager welcomed us and offered the only engine under 100-horsepower he had in stock, as here boaters were not used to equipping their boats with anything less. We were gradually becoming aware of the power of the river.

The little 6hp Yamaha engine doesn’t have a long arm, and we’ll have to be inventive to adapt it to the hull of the boat without damaging the steam system. We are already late so we must not delay. After a visit to an ATM to collect the necessary sum, it's official: we don't have much money left for the coming days, but we have a new engine. The similarity with Freddy, the engine on our previous boat, is obvious, but we hope this one, which will never be baptised, will work better.

On the way back we made a stop at a gas station which was selling firewood. I’d spotted it months earlier while I was tirelessly following the river on Google Maps to mark our drop points as much as possible, to identify possible shelters and organise navigation according to locks, bridges, ports, marinas, roads, bars or gas stations.

For years, every evening before going to work in my little restaurant I’d spend an hour or two methodically following this route online. Every evening I tried to imagine our future navigation. I learned by heart each of the stages of our trip, the stops, what we had to do. Later during the realisation of the project, we were going to stop at these places, like this gas station that I already had the impression I knew by heart, and it was strange. But of course, I’d never been able to anticipate who we were going to meet.

Back in McGregor it is already too late to set off again, we prefer to work on the installation of the new engine and only resume navigation the next morning. The film crew must get back on the road to honour the Airbnb reservations we’d made. Taking into account this delay, we wouldn’t find them again until two days later if we managed to catch up. It was then that the multi-level organisation of the project was revealed. Having to deal with both remote shooting and navigation was exhausting. You had to keep one eye on the gauge of the steam engine, one eye on the river and its dangers, one eye on the map, and one eye on the phone’s screen to chat with the head cameraman and his assistant. It was also necessary to take advantage of what we were going through, to soak up everything for the purpose of the future transcription of the project. To be in several places at the same time. Great demands which would slowly consume me.

The monotonous landscape sometimes gave way to striking places, the river just a few meters wide from one side to the other widened without warning by several kilometres and gave us the feeling of the open sea with wind and waves. I found myself putting on my life jacket discreetly, and the prospect of swimming to the shore in the event of a shipwreck didn’t really make me happy.

At nightfall we ground the boat near an uprooted tree and use it to moor. We are on an island a few kilometres from a small town that we can vaguely make out. We jump on the muddy sand beach, collect the still glowing embers from the boiler and make a fire to give us some light and warm us up. The day was long, a simple meal was quickly devoured, and we went to bed without any delay.

In the early morning hours my forehead, hands and legs are covered with hundreds of insect stings and Mark’s ankle has tripled in size, swollen like a pincushion.

The itching is unbearable, the blood flows from scratching, nothing calms this burning sensation, and later a doctor, who I’ll meet by chance over a cup of coffee, will tell me these marks are caused by buffalo gnats and are not stings but bites. Today I’m still wearing the scars of their feasting that night.

Despite everything, we return to the beach to reorganise and cut dead branches in order to replenish our stock of wood. It’s damp and burns less well than the wood from the gas station, so we take turns at watching the fire to keep our pace and reach Davenport before dark. Before that we will have to pass two locks, and at the bend of one of them we’ll moor the boat at the floating pontoon of a public launching facility. There fishermen put their boats in the water to get as close as possible to the mouth of the lock, where eddies full of fish are formed. Some curious people approach us to look at the boat, one of them is a broken man, cap screwed on his head and a respirator in hand. It was his son who unloaded him there, before he went to get the pick-up, which will help them to lift their boat out of the water.

As soon as he gets on the pontoon the old man climbs over the hull and enters our boat, attracted by the old engine, in an instant he begins to question us about how it works, his sentences cut by lack of breath.