Category: Lake Michigan

August 30, 2019 – What better way to kick off Labor Day weekend than taking your own boat through downtown Chicago?

We’d taken the architectural boat tour, and ridden a water taxi from Chinatown back to the city center, so we had a feel for the waterway itself, and how busy it could be. It would have been nice to head down right at sunrise, to avoid some of that, but there was an Amtrak railroad bridge that would need to be raised for us, and with morning commuter trains, we were concerned about being trapped there for hours, so we planned to hit it around 10.

We measured, and measured, to convince ourselves that we could clear a fixed railroad bridge south of Chicago, with a clearance of 17’6″. It’d be terrible to get there, and have to backtrack. We normally are 19′ high, to our antenna tips, but we folded down our antennas and the radar mast, to make us 16′. We are pretty sure…

The Chicago Harbor Lock, separates the Chicago River from Lake Michigan, and we left our mooring for a short 15 minute trip into the lock, then, it’s into the city.

After clearing the lock, it was one bridge after another – these are mostly 18-20 feet, but they sure look close! We had to be alert for the water taxis, which zigzag back and forth from docks on either side, and stopped a few times to let them go.

Here are some videos taken while going through the city.

Our friends who had gone through a day earlier had to wait for three trains at the Amtrak bridge, and told us to plan to hit it after 10. We did, but still had to wait about 15 minutes before it would lift for us – here’s a video of the lift.

The trip from here began to get more and more industrial, and pretty soon we are facing the lowest fixed bridge (it opened, once upon a time, but not any more) that we have to cross under in order to continue.

To be continued…

August 27, 2019

<sigh…someday we will go back and fill in the details, but we are going to start fresh, at the south end of Lake Michigan>

We’d made a great choice to head out of South Haven, Michigan and down the lake on Monday, as a stretch of high winds were coming that would have locked us down for days. A quick overnight at Michigan City, Indiana, and then onward for a quick pit-stop for fuel in Hammond before we pressed on for Chicago. At the bottom of Lake Michigan now, we were now heading due west, into the wind and waves.

We were able to make out the Chicago skyline from almost 30 miles away, and the waters started to get a little busier with commercial traffic around the port of Calumet, from which cargo could be sent down the Calumet River to the Gulf.

We stayed at the Monroe Harbor mooring field – easier and more secure than anchoring, and cheaper (but less convenient) than a marina. With a tender service that would come out and pick us up at the boat, we had a great location from which to explore the City. What a view!

The weather was spectacular the week before Labor Day, other than windy (but hey, it’s the Windy City, right?) and we were able to take in the Navy Pier, deep-dish pizza (Gino’s East), go to a skyscraper for the high perspective, Chinatown, the Bean, and the Art Institute of Chicago, during our three-day stay.

In preparation for taking our own boat through downtown, we took an architectural boat tour; the docent did a great job pointing out the historical context of many of the highlights, and we took many pictures, knowing that we might be just a tad occupied when we had the wheel ourselves.

We enjoyed the final Wednesday night fireworks show, put on at Navy Pier, from the deck of our boat, and enjoyed the night skyline.