Tuesday and
Wednesday 22/23 August 2017
We did some organizing on Tuesday getting some of our stuff
collected in hand carry bags and stowed in the forward cabin. We have decided to move off the boat tomorrow
and spend the first night in Michigan City ashore in a motel so the boat can be
completely cleared out and cleaned up before Ken and Trudy Price arrive to take
possession the next morning.
Underway at 0600 today for Lake Michigan! We had two locks to get through on the
waterway and one lock at the harbor to Chicago and had good luck with the first
two as there was little barge traffic.
We were in and out of the locks in short order. And then we ran into the Asian Carp barrier. The Corp of Engineers is testing various
aspects of this barrier to prevent the spread of Asian Carp into the Great
Lakes, and we got caught up in it because we had to wait two hours before they
took a break from their testing and let us through.
We passed a lot of barge shuffling operations as smaller tugs
maneuvered barges hither and thither. We
were stopped a couple of times for a few minutes until the situation became
clear.
As we closed in on Chicago, the low bridges came fast. With the mast down, our bimini tops out at 15
feet and 5 inches above the water. A
number of the bridges we had to go under were 16 feet and some inches, and it
was a test of nerve to stand on the flying bridge and watch the heavy steel
silently pass overhead. Finally, we came
to the one bridge we could not slide under, a railroad bridge near downtown
with only 11 feet of clearance. The
bridge tender told us it would be a half hour before he could raise the ugly
rusty monster, but only ten minutes after we tied up to a nearby floating pier,
he raised the bridge and we were on our way to the center of downtown.
As we approached the canyon formed by all the skyscrapers we ran
into the terminus of all the tour boats.
They all turn around and head back to the harbor at this one spot, and we
just slipped in amongst them. There were
dozens of them big and no so big. The
noise of traffic, boat engines, sirens, and whatnot echoing off the tall
buildings created a cacophony as we stayed in our place in line until the line
turned about again leaving us sitting alone in front of the Chicago Harbor
Lock. We had just missed a lock sequence
into Lake Michigan and so hung out for 20 minutes or so as more vessels
collected for the next one. This lock
experiences a small lift into the Lake and has none of the usual floating
bollards we have become used to.
Instead, this look feature lines hanging down for boaters to hold onto
while the water is allowed to flow into the chamber. Just astern of us was a pontoon boat full of
a bunch of folks who were clearly new at this sport, and they laughed and
squealed as they fumbled about back there trying to catch and then hold their lines.
Eventually this final obstacle to our unfettered progress also
fell away, and we were released into Lake Michigan like fingerlings into a
trout stream. We moored at a tee-head
pier in DuSable Harbor Marina from which we will lunch ourselves at Michigan
City early tomorrow morning. We raised
the mast back up with the help of a passerby, and I went into the engine room
to solve the question of why the alternator stopped charging the batteries
today – loose connection of the power feed to the regulator.
