12 miles of hell

In the last post I promised to tell you about the 12 miles of hell. Boaters call it that because it is a skinny piece of water where the Cal-Sag and Chicago canals come together and it is also a fleeting area for the commercial tugs that work up and down the inland rivers. A fleeting area means it is where tugs drop off their barges and collect new barges for the trip back down river.

These are not small tugs I am talking about. These are tugs that run 24 hours a day, carry three crews, and push 6-12 50 foot barges in front of them. As you can see in the picture, they have a steering station that can be lowered as necessary for bridges, but generally runs up high so whoever is steering the boat can see over the barges to determine what is coming at them.

Tug with the pilothouse in the raised position

In the 12 miles of hell you find multiple tugs maneuvering their barges in all directions. Some are docking against the walls of the canal, some are turning into basins in the side of the canal, some have already dropped off one load and are turning around in the canal to pick up another load. As you can see, the canal is only about two tugs wide which leaves a poor pleasure craft (tug terminology for recreational boaters) either sitting still waiting for them to move, or dodging between them from sitting spot to sitting spot.

Two tugs, no room

Even when they are not moving, just sitting next to their barges, there is not a lot of clearance between a tug and the canal wall.

We spent nearly 90 minutes getting through the fleeting area.  Just as we arrived three tugs were maneuvering at the entrance area, blocking the entire canal. We had to pull into an unused fleeting basin and wait for them to sort themselves out.  We knew about the three tugs, and how to hail them by name to find out what they wanted us to do, because Jim added an AIS (automatic identification system) receiver to our collection of toys last winter.

All commercial boats broadcast an AIS signal with their name, size, location and destination. The receiver picks that up and, with a wireless interface to an iPad, displays the information and the boat's location on a navigation chart on the iPad. The chart software also displays where we are. The AIS has a range of about five miles, so we get early warning of what is coming towards us. We can see what the river is like between us and the tug and know, if it narrows, that we need to slow down to stay in a wide area where the tug can safely pass. With the AIS display we know the oncoming boat's name and we are able to hail them and agree exactly how we are going to pass when we do meet each other. It takes a lot of the tension out of driving a pleasure craft down a commercial river.

We had funny interaction with one of the tugs yesterday. We were in a wide but twisty part of the river, so we couldn't see the tug but we knew he was there. We called him and agreed on the passing protocol, no problem. But when we came around the last corner and he could finally see us, he called and wanted to know how it was that we knew he was there. Jim and the tug captain had a nice conversation about pleasure craft AIS receivers.

Chicago

We had a wonderful four days in Chicago. We got to spend some more time with the Chicago grandkids, and I did some shopping and museum hopping. Ted Schwartz, who owns the same boat we do, was able to get us a slip in his marina in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago. We were one block from the lake shore jogging/bike trail, two blocks from the Lincoln Park zoo, and had a choice of three different bus routes to get downtown. To get to the buses, you had to walk across the park and this was the view of downtown you had from the park.

My other favorite view of the park was the recently renovated lily pond. I walked through here in the mornings to the sound of singing birds and bubbling waterfalls, a great way to start the day.

Chicago actually has one of the great skylines of America from the water. I admit to thinking that tourist "take a ride on the lake" boat tours are usually cheesy, but if you don't have your own boat or as friend with a boat in Chicago, I guess I'd recommend taking the lakefront water tour. The city view is just plain spectacular from the water.

Looking north

Looking south

We've had several folks ask how you get a boat from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. The answer is you go down the Illinois River. To get to the Illinois River you can go through one of two canals, the Cal Sag channel which starts in Calumet, or the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal (CSSC) which runs right through the heart of the city. Look on the map and you'll see two green routes in the upper right hand corner. The northern most route is the CSSC.  The two canals join up in the middle of an area that recreational boaters call "twelve miles of hell." More about that in the next post.

We took the CSSC through Chicago. This is the view from the boat as we headed through downtown.

One of things we did while we were in Chicago this time was to take the architectural boat tour. With all the times we have been in Chicago, neither of us had taken this tour before. We learned lots on the tour, but two things really caught our attention. One is that the Chicago Tribune Building has stones from famous landmarks around the world embedded into its outside walls. The Great Wall of China, the Houses of Parliament, and Petra are just some of the stones. I can't tell you how many times I've walked past that building in the last 30 years without realizing those stones were there.

Stones embedded in the Trib building

The other thing the tour guide told us is that there is a zeppelin landing spot at the top of the Intercontinental Hotel. Many folks claim it is an urban myth, but the top of the hotel does have a very strange bright yellow onion dome.

Miscellaneous musings on Michigan

We've left Michigan behind, but I have to say it was quite a revelation. I've never spent any time in Michigan but I can certainly see myself going back again. We spent over a month slowly working our way down the western coast of Michigan, both because we were interested to see it and because the rivers south of Lake Michigan were flooded and, therefore, not open to recreational traffic.

Michigan has beautiful, mostly uncrowded beaches. As a Southern California native and a frequent South Florida visitor, I am used to beaches where there is barely enough room to put down a beach towel without invading you neighbor's personal space. The Michigan beaches have beautiful, soft sand and the coastal communities work to keep them clean and attractive. I watched city employees groom the sand on the beaches in the early morning in more than one town. What does "grooming the sand" mean you ask? They have special little tractors specifically built for sand management that churn through the top couple in inches, remove any large rocks, trash, etc., and smooth out the top of the sand.

Every beach has clean restrooms, good parking and, usually, a concessionaire that rents umbrellas, beach chairs, water toys, and sells ice cream. Small picnic pavilions with grills are dotted along the beaches.  Beach volleyball courts are common. Many beaches also have campgrounds associated with them for RVs. They have special areas marked off for folks who want to bring their pets (usually but not always dogs) to the beach. Instead of a big sign with a whole set of don't instructions, the governments in Michigan have worked to find ways to compatibly accommodate all of the various interests of the folks who use their beaches.

Each little town along the water has its own character. There are certainly chain tourist shops that you see in every town, but there are also many local, one shop operations in each town. Everyone knows that you have to make the bulk of the year's money during the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day so you don't get any of the tourist resentment you sometimes experience in resort areas with longer seasons. I don't think we met a single grumpy, unhappy person during the entire month we spent in Michigan.

Below are some of the Michigan pictures that didn't make it into the earlier blog posts. This is the only other Down Time boat we've ever run into. It was a fishing charter boat in Grand Haven. While we were there the fishermen were catching big salmon. Salmon is not native to Lake Michigan. According to our friend Ted Schwartz (an Endeavor Trawlercat 36 owner from Chicago), the salmon was introduced in the 1960s to address a problem with alewifes, an invasive species of fish that killed off many of the native Great Lakes fish in Lake Michigan.

This was the dockmaster's John Deere Gator in St. Joe. We enjoyed the fact that it was tricked out with a life ring, just in case someone fell in.

Marina Gator

Finally, this is Jim posing with a paper-mache menagerie we found walking to breakfast in Grand Haven. We took a town trolley tour while we were there, but no one could explain what the critters were used for. Parade float decorations maybe?

We're done with Michigan and on to Illinois, but if you are looking for a beachy, small towns getaway, give Michigan a thought, especially if you have an RV.

Happy Fourth of July

We have washed up in St. Joseph, Michigan, a smallish resort town in southwestern Michigan. By boat we are only 52 miles from Chicago, almost due west across Lake Michigan. Of course, nothing is easy in boating. You can't just head west and arrive in Chicago. You have to pick a weather window so Lake Michigan won't kick your butt. When we arrived in St. Joe the weather was not cooperating. The forecast looked bad for days to come, so we decided to rent a car and visit Jim's daughter and grandkids at their lake house in Monticello, IN, only 100 miles from here.  As soon as we picked up the car, the weather changed. Oh well.

After we got back from Monticello, we were treated to a full day of rain, which brought us to July 3. We could have left then for Michigan City, IN, but that would have had us arriving in Chicago on Thursday, July 4. If you've been reading along with this trip, you know that we generally don't like moving the boat on weekends. And we really don't like the combination of weekends, holidays, and large cities with lots and lots of watercraft of all sizes and descriptions.  So we decided to sit here through the holiday and start moving again at the start of next week.

This picture gives you some idea of why we don't like to travel on weekends. This was a not particularly nice weekend day in the entrance channel at St. Joseph, Michigan.

St. Joe weekend boaters

Just to spice things up a bit, I broke my hand last weekend. Going down a set of steps, I missed one. I threw out my hand to stabilize myself and ended up hitting something hard with the side of my hand. I broke the 5th (small finger) metacarpal (the bone between your knuckle and your wrist) in my left hand, and, yes, I am left-handed. I am entombed in a removable cast from two inches below my wrist all the way through to the tips of my last two fingers. Fortunately, I throw docking lines with my right hand, so the broken hand hasn't gotten in the way of boating. Eating, writing, etc., those are the challenging tasks.

My removable hand cast

I've only broken two bones in my life and both happened while we were on the boat in small towns where we knew no one. In both cases I got really lucky with the local medical options. With this last incident we were in South Haven, MI. There was a local cab service (not as common as you might think) to take us to the urgent care clinic run by the local hospital (also not all that common in these small towns). Turns out that this hospital is the regional center for orthopedic issues. Even better, when the nurse practitioner at the urgent care clinic wanted to send me to an orthopedic surgeon to evaluate the break (at 5:45 PM), it was the ortho doc's night to work until 7:00 PM. The whole process, from call the cab to return home in a cast took less than 3 hours.

Enjoy your barbecues and fireworks. When next you hear from us, we'll be through Chicago and headed to the Mississippi River.

Coastal Western Michigan

We are about a week and a half into our leisurely trip down the western coast of Michigan. Part of the slowness is wanting to stop and see all of the small, cute, small coastal towns. Part of the slowness is that the rivers south of Chicago are still flooded and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard have closed the rivers to recreational boating traffic. And a couple of days of the slowness are attributable to weather.

For the most part the weather has been fine, we did have one day of 30 knot winds and 4-6 foot seas on Lake Michigan, but we spent that day happily attached to a dock in Pentwater. Today's weather event was fog. We are in Whitehall, which is a town at the upper end of the 4 mile long White Lake, about half way down Michigan's west coast.  When we woke up this morning, the town and marina were shrouded in fog. About 10:00 AM it looked like the fog was lifting, so we left and headed for Lake Michigan. We didn't even get halfway down White Lake before deciding to go back. The fog just kept getting thicker the closer we got to Lake Michigan. We're getting smarter. We were planning to go to Muskegon, which is only 10 miles away. A couple of years ago, we probably would have continued, telling ourselves that the fog would lift. This morning we acknowledged that we weren't in any hurry, turned around and went back to our slip in the municipal marina.

In Ludington, MI, we stopped long enough to ride the last coal-fired steamship car ferry crossing Lake Michigan. The Badger was once part of a fleet of nine steamships that shuttled passengers, cars and railroad cars from Ludington, MI to Manitowoc, WI. In their busiest year, the ships moved 141,000 rail cars from Michigan to Wisconsin. The ferries were actually built and owned by the railroad companies. Before the ferries were built, they would unload the train car's cargo onto boats, ferry the cargo across the lake, then reload the cargo to train cars at the other end. Which, of course, begs the question why didn't they just build their rails to go south of the lake through Chicago? Jim thinks he heard that the rails in the Chicago area were owned by other companies and it was actually cheaper to build ferries that could move the loaded rail cars. Of course, they don't ferry rail cars any more, so who knows what the real story is.

S.S. Badger

Of course, since these ferries were built to hold entire trains, they have plenty of room to transport cars, RVs, and commercial trucks. One of their most frequent cargoes these days are windmill parts. There are several large windmill fields on the Lake Michigan coast already and more are being built. The windmills themselves are built in Wisconsin and then trucked to Michigan.  From a distance, you see the windmills but you don't get any perspective on just how big they are.  Here is a picture of Jim standing next to a part waiting to be loaded.

Jim and the windmill

We watched the parts being loaded in Manitowoc. It was quite a feat. The truck had two large trailer pieces with the windmill part suspended between them. It appeared that the windmill part could be raised or lowered by the two trailer pieces. The windmill parts barely fit (by height) on the ship, so they had been lowered  to nearly dragging on the ground. They would have been much to close to the ground if they were being driven down the road. To back the parts onto the ship, one man from the shipping company controlled the rear trailer with a hand held control, while the driver backed onto the ship. This clearly wasn't the first rodeo for any of the guys who worked for the trucking company. It was fascinating to watch.

Backing onto the ship

Maneuvering from the front

Not everything on the ship was huge. We also got a photo of this charming little camper. Our friends Walter and Margaret Boswell were in the market for a camper and we thought this would be perfect for them, but they found and bought something else before we could get this picture sent to them.

Whitehall, where we are today, is considered the first town "up north" in Michigan. From Muskegon south we will be in much larger cities and more populated resort towns. Stay tuned for posts from the southern half of lower Michigan.

2013 Cruising Season Begins

We are back on the boat and under way. Yeah! Getting back to the boat was a two step process this year. We had planned to launch the boat in mid-May, but the folks at the boat yard said that was a bit optimistic, the cold weather was lingering in upper lower Michigan and there was still some ice around in early May. So we settled for bringing our clothes, boat parts, cruising guides and charts, etc. up from Cleveland then going back to Ohio to wait for a couple of more weeks. On our brief trip in mid-May, we stopped in Frankenmuth, MI, site of the country's largest Christmas store.  Jim made a motel reservation there and we got a sense of how early in the season we really were when we arrived and found this on the motel's sign board:

We never met the Birggars, but we both agreed that with all the hotels and motels we have stayed in in the last 40 years, this was the first time either of us had been welcomed on the sign out front.

We finally arrived to launch the boat at the end of May. I went to California for my niece's wedding and flew back from there to Charlevoix where the boat was. Jim took the Greyhound bus from Cleveland to Charlevoix, a 13 hour 3 bus experience he declared to be "just fine." Our friends Bill and Birute Fleck let us stay with them for two nights while we were getting the boat launched.

Here is a picture of the boat leaving the barn. Note the cool way the door folds up. These doors are huge, 25-30 feet tall and 50-60 feet wide.

Here she is reversing the process of last fall, being lowered back into the water.

This is the trailer that carried her the 2-3 miles from the barn to the boat launch. We don't normally think of our boat as a trailerable boat, but by the standards of Bergmann's boat yard, she is small.  There was a 55 foot Viking sport fisher waiting to be launched while Down Time was going into the water. That boat was so big they had to bring a bucket truck along to re-set the outriggers (the things that manage the fishing lines).  That trailer had eight sets of wheels, but they still drove it down the city streets from the yard to the boat launch.

Its great to be back on the boat, but we are freezing to death. The morning we left Charlevoix there was ice on the deck.  I didn't pack for this kind of weather, I've already had to buy a sweat shirt and a pair of sweat pants.  Jim says we'll look back on these days with longing when we are in Tennessee in August. I did find one unexpected compensation for the Michigan weather, however -- morel mushrooms. I found them at the Elberta, MI farmer's market this morning for $5.00 for 6 ounces of mushrooms. Fellow fungus lovers, eat your hearts out; fresh morels for less than $1/oz.

Tuesday, August 28 – The weather finally cooperated for us to make the trip from Mackinac City to Charlevoix.  The problem was that we would be traveling through four weather zones in the space of the 60 mile trip.  First, we had to go north on Lake Huron, then west through the Straits of Mackinac, then south through Gray’s Reef Passage, and finally southeast to Charlevoix.

Charlevoix is a resort town with a  winter population is about 2,500 and a summer one of about 25,000.  It is one of those places where, before air conditioning, people from Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland came to escape the summer heat.  We were there over Labor Day weekend for the last hurrah of summer.  We rented a car for the weekend and did some touring of the area including Traverse City.

We were scheduled to be hauled early on Tuesday, the day after Labor Day.  Every other time Down Time has been hauled it has been with a travel lift.  This time it was on a giant trailer that backed down a public boat launching ramp.  We drove the boat on the trailer just like you would a 18 foot ski boat (remember Down Time is 36 feet long, 15 feet wide, and weights about 23,000 pounds).  The people doing the hauling were Bergmann Marine and they have hauled several boats identical to Down Time using this method.  It’s one of the reasons we used them.

Little truck hauling our big boat

On the trailier

The trailer was pulled several miles over public roads to the Bergmann main facility where the bottom was power washed and we unloaded our stuff into our rental car.  By 11 am we were all (Jim, Diane and Ron) on our way to Cleveland.  Later Down Time was moved into a heated barn where she will spend the winter.

Headed down the road to storage

Ron stayed a few days with us in Cleveland before flying back home to Texas.  We enjoyed having him with us and hope he joins us for part of next year’s trip.