To begin our 1300 mile trip from Chicago to Mobile Bay in the Gulf of Mexico we had to first get through the Chicago lock and the actual city of Chicago. We left our rolly polly mooring ball in Munroe Harbour at about 7AM, not able to stand the nauseating waves any longer. The lock was a breeze: 2 lines to hold onto and a drop of about 2 feet. It reminded us of a smaller version of the St. Peter’s canal in Cape Breton!
Going through the city was amazing! Skyscrapers jutted up on either side of the Chicago river, and we went under bridge after bridge downtown, as people above us rushed to work. Seeing the buildings up close and from that angle was incredible. The river is really narrow so it feels like you are completely surrounded by buildings. It was one of the highlights of the trip, and on day one to boot. An amazing experience to say the least!
After Chicago the river got a lot more industrial and we started to encounter tows pushing huge barges. They required careful communication to figure out when and where to pass but they were really great to deal with. They seem to respond better to women on the radio so communications became my job. I would just ask any tow that was anywhere near us what they wanted us to do and followed their directions precisely. They have a cool system for passing using whistles. One whistle means that you are going to pass the other boat on your port side, two whistles means on your starboard side. This holds true for whether you are passing head on or overtaking to pass. There were a lot of barge staging areas outside Chicago where tows push huge amounts of barges up against the shore as they wait their turn to go by another one, wait for a lock or load up more barges. It is all pretty frantic and intimidating, especially after you figure out that they don’t slow down fast and they can’t turn fast either. It’s best to stay as far out of the way as possible!
As we continued down the river the locks got more and more intense. In the beginning they were drops of 20 to 40 or so feet but some ended up being over 80 feet lifts as we got further down. Talk about a wild ride! Anything can happen in a lock. For example, sometimes you will end up against the wall with a boat rafted to your side, sometimes you are the one rafted and other times you end up in the middle if they raft 3 wide. Also you have to watch for bollards (the metal things that float up and down that you tie onto) that don’t work and avoid them. There are also holes in some of the lock walls that fenders can get caught in. So you need to remain alert, wear gloves and keep a machete handy in case you need to cut a line.
The biggest issue we faced traveling down the river system was the water level. In the Illinois, Mississippi and other rivers the water was at its lowest level in over seventy years. We managed somehow to avoid running aground except for very briefly one day early just a few days in from Chicago. We had a marina booked, but we couldn’t get into it because the water level was too low in their channel. They offered us a dock on the side of the river that was supposed to have 7 feet, which turned out to be 4 feet in reality. Douglas used reverse and forward throttle to rock us back and forth and bow thruster to get us out in about 30 seconds. We were luckier than a lot of other boaters who we saw getting towed from all sorts of places where the charts said there was water but their keels found bottom instead. The whole way down the river our guide book showed anchorages that should have had more than 8 feet of water but were now totally dry. We had to have lists with multiple options for anchoring each day so that if we ran into one or two dry ones we could still head somewhere safe for the night.
The Illinois river had some amazing anchorages and because we were traveling with a group of new friends (including a Swedish couple who lived in Cape Breton for 5 years in the 80s), every night was a gathering on someone’s boat for dinner or drinks or both. We also used some free city docks to tie up in the Illinois river. They often had very little water coming into them and nothing to tie onto on the dock, but they were free and safe so we used everyone we found, and we met a lot of people at those city docks. Every dock or marina and sometimes anchorages would be full of loopers – people doing the great loop of America route that takes them down the inland river system, around Florida and back up the east coast to the Erie canal and back into the Great Lakes.
The other big issue for us with the water levels being so low was that we couldn’t get fuel or pump outs very often. Our black water tank and water tanks get us through s little more than 2 weeks with careful use. Our diesel we weren’t so sure about since we had mostly sailed since buying the boat. Our tank is 50 gallons, which we did not get filled before leaving Chicago because we were being stupid and thought that we would have a lot of chances to do so further down the river. By the time we got to Peoria, Illinois, we knew we were going to have trouble finding a place to fill up. At that time we were traveling with our friends from Sweden who happened to have folding bikes onboard. We borrowed their bikes and brought our 5 gallon diesel jug to a gas station. After putting that into the boat, Douglas decided to go back and get another 5 gallons. We felt pretty good about that with our calculations, but when we finally got gas in Alton, near St Louis, it took 46 gallons to fill it!
To be continued…..
