A Notorious Free Dock?!

The Peoria free dock is the now-defunct city marina. It looks like it was really nice at one point, but the birds and weather have taken it over. Someone said to us about this dock “tie up here and die up here” but that was far from our experience.

There are a lot of slips for smaller boats, but only two spots for a large boat, like Swamp Puppy, to tie up. We’d heard there was no electricity or potable water, . Still, $0/night is hard to beat! We stayed for 3 nights.

The dock is right in downtown Peoria — we went to the museum and planetarium, reprovisioned, and walked across the Bob Michel Bridge twice because the Bass Pro sign visible across the river demanded it. Near Bass Pro is also Walmart and Lowe’s.

Whenever we leave our boat, we always set up security cameras which we monitor remotely via our Starlink internet. Tom set the cameras up shortly after our arrival, and at no point during our ~65 hour stay did anyone approach our boat. It’s over 500 feet from the dock entrance to our boat, and our camera had a straight line of sight the entire distance. The only people who came down the dock where Swamp Puppy was tied were other boaters who had also docked their boats here.

The green space and the riverfront walk adjacent to the dock were very popular – just like most riverfront walks we’ve been to. Who doesn’t want to watch the boats cruise by? I know I do! People would stop and posit that we had certainly trailered our boat here from Florida. Sometimes we’d come out to tell them exactly how we got here, and enjoy the shock on their faces.

And that’s the Peoria town dock!