Sadly, after 12 days (11 nights) in Chicago, it is time to head south on the Chicago River and points beyond... The Admiral took this last picture of a sunrise over Lake Michigan just before she woke me up. We (the Admiral, her Father (Jim) and I) left the dock at 7:00 am, and after a brief stop to pump out the holding tank, we cleared the marina about 7:20 am. Our trip was a long 55.5 miles, including three locks. In addition, we passed under a (whopping) 62 bridges plus one Amtrak bridge that had to open for us. Of course, the majority (43) of these bridges were in the first 17 miles.
On our short trip to the lock at the Chicago River we did get some beautiful views of downtown Chicago with the (very) early morning sun reflecting off of the buildings and then off of the water back to us. The views (see a sample in the picture at the left) were so spectacular that I was
almost happy to be awake this early.
As we entered the lock between Lake Michigan and the Chicago River, we continued to see the beautiful views of sunlight reflecting off the buildings onto the water and back to us. This was our third time to enter this lock (picture at right), and the sun angles were very different each time, which also made each trip different.
Since this is our third trip through the first 19 bridges, I will spare you any more pictures of downtown Chicago. Once we were into new territory past that nineteenth bridge, we were essentially out of downtown Chicago. The character of the town and in particular, the water front changed dramatically. We passed hundreds of barges with sand, gravel and (dry) cement. These are the basic components for cement used in building and highway construction, and in the case of Chicago, it is brought in by barge. The Chicago River was narrow enough that we had to wait several times for tows each with barges two wide to pass each other. Then we would have to hurry to pass the tow headed in our direction before it passed another tow headed in the other direction. Even though today was a Sunday, the traffic was fairly heavy as they were staging empty barges for later transport back down river.
One of the more "interesting" parts of today's trip was passing through an electronic fish barrier that was installed to prevent Asian Carp from reaching Lake Michigan. The barrier was designed and installed by the Corps of Engineers to prevent this invasive species from ultimately getting into all of the Great Lakes. The barrier is about 0.6 miles long and has undergone a lot of changes and refinements over the past 3 years. For a while the river was just flat out closed. Then it was opened for short periods of time to allow carefully guarded boats to past through the barrier. Now, the voltage is low enough to not harm boats, but swimming, fishing, etc. is prohibited. There is still the possibility that the river might still be permanently closed to prevent the carp and/or future invasive species from entering the Great Lakes. Imagine being able to do all of the Great Loop on the water, except for having your boat transported 0.6 miles by trailer...
Inside the last two (of 3) locks for today, we had our first floating bollards of the entire trip. All of the previous locks either had lines hanging down the wall of the lock to grab onto or rods inside a recessed cavity in the lock wall to which you could wrap a line around. In the picture at the right Terry is holding onto a line that is attached to the floating bollard, which looks like a (rusty) vertical pipe with a mushroom on top. If all goes well, the bollard floats up/down with the boat as the water level changes. The reason that Terry is holding on to the line is that in the event that the bollard gets stuck, you must be able to let out line to allow the boat to continue up/down. So, while floating bollards sound like a nice convenience they are not fool proof.
Since we are now in "barge country" where there will be a lot more barge traffic, both the tows and the locks will progressively get larger. At the moment, the tows are limited to 8 barges consisting of four pairs of side by side barges. For scale, the picture at the left shows Grand Finale, who was a travelling companion today, across and about halfway down one of the locks today. She is 40' long but is dwarfed by the bigger lock, and since the locks are larger, it takes longer for them to empty/fill. Thus our transit times for each lock will go up. By the southern portion of the Mississippi River, the tows can be as large as 72 barges with two tugs pushing them. We are not going all of the way down the Mississippi River so I think that the largest tows that we will pass will be 15 barges (5 long by 3 wide).
We reached our final destination the Harborside Marina in Wilmington, IL after a long day of nearly 11 hours. Needless to say, we all slept very well, but not before we had this lovely view of the Moon shinning on the Illinois River.
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