Day 39, September 10th, 2009
Untied the mooring buoy at 6:00 a.m. after a horrid night with little sleep. It was lumpy on the mooring and the waves slopped us about all night. However, reached Crowley's Boat Yard shortley after 8:00, having passed through the first three bridges on the Calumet River. We immediately got busy preparing our framing to support the mast. It was a little awkward but managed to get everything in place and then the riggers took over and brought the mast down. All went pretty smoothly. We were then left to tie everything on securely. John had also noticed a small oil leak at the fron of the engine a few days before. This was just as he had suspected, a small seal needed replacing. The repair guy looked after this very quickly and we were relieved! Spent the night on the dock - we thought we'd have to pay for this but they didn't charge us!
A couple of weeks before we had started to hear about the Army Corps of Engineers increasing the voltage at the Fish Barrier just south of Chicago. By the time we reached Chicago the Great Loopers Association were taking steps to negotiate a deal with the towing company "Artco". Up until this time pleasure craft had been prevented from passing the fish barrier on their own but had to hire a dead tow from Artco to take them through at a cost of $600.00!!! It was complicated, you needed authorization from the Coast Guard to go through the Barrier as well.
We signed up with the Great Loopers Association for their deal with Artco at a reduction of 20% - $495.00 and were counting ourselves lucky with this! It took John quite a bit of time on the computer to register with the Coast Guard and get the paper work filed on the computer for the tow. While we were at Crowleys we got the okay from the Coast Guard and felt that all things had been cleared away for our tow on Saturday morning. We went to bed that night confident that all was in place.
Untied the mooring buoy at 6:00 a.m. after a horrid night with little sleep. It was lumpy on the mooring and the waves slopped us about all night. However, reached Crowley's Boat Yard shortley after 8:00, having passed through the first three bridges on the Calumet River. We immediately got busy preparing our framing to support the mast. It was a little awkward but managed to get everything in place and then the riggers took over and brought the mast down. All went pretty smoothly. We were then left to tie everything on securely. John had also noticed a small oil leak at the fron of the engine a few days before. This was just as he had suspected, a small seal needed replacing. The repair guy looked after this very quickly and we were relieved! Spent the night on the dock - we thought we'd have to pay for this but they didn't charge us!
A couple of weeks before we had started to hear about the Army Corps of Engineers increasing the voltage at the Fish Barrier just south of Chicago. By the time we reached Chicago the Great Loopers Association were taking steps to negotiate a deal with the towing company "Artco". Up until this time pleasure craft had been prevented from passing the fish barrier on their own but had to hire a dead tow from Artco to take them through at a cost of $600.00!!! It was complicated, you needed authorization from the Coast Guard to go through the Barrier as well.
We signed up with the Great Loopers Association for their deal with Artco at a reduction of 20% - $495.00 and were counting ourselves lucky with this! It took John quite a bit of time on the computer to register with the Coast Guard and get the paper work filed on the computer for the tow. While we were at Crowleys we got the okay from the Coast Guard and felt that all things had been cleared away for our tow on Saturday morning. We went to bed that night confident that all was in place.
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