10 hrs, 103 mi to marine services marina
ah, this should be fun. cruising mac moore''s boat "september song" from it's home at the milwaukee yacht club to it's new home in naples, florida. 3 crew members have signed on for the entire trip: mike callahan, john kuber, and the author, tom reinertson. mac, of course, will captain the entire cruise and scott campbell has signed on for 2 days as our electronics guru.
preparations for this cruise have been extensive. mac has been planning the route and our stops while his beautiful wife, tricia, has been packing food, drinks, and all of our supplies as well as organizing and labeling where everything has been stowed. because of the 19' clearance bridge in lemont, il, september song's, arch had to be removed and lashed to the fordeck. this was a difficult job because of all the electrical wiring running thru the arch from the equipment on high to the instruments on the bridge. scott was in charge of the wiring disassembly and was on board until the lemont bridge was cleared and the arch could be raised and reassembled.
spending sunday night, sep 19, aboard, mac, john & tom were joined early the following morning by mike & scott and we set sail around 7am monday morning. i've often said that without bad weather we wouldn't appreciate the good weather and it seems the weather gods wanted to insure that we appreciated any good weather that came our way by starting the trip with low hanging, gloomy clouds accompanied by a brisk easterly breeze that mixed with the overnight northeasterly wind to create a confused 3' chop almost the entire day from milwaukee to just south of chicago.
during the cold, rocking and rolling of the open water we were pretty much confined inside but once we entered the canal we were able to get out onto the deck and enjoy "ditch cruising".
as we were serenely cruising thru the canal we received a radio call from a friendly tug boat captain who asked where we were headed and we thought "wow, people here sure are friendly". we proudly told him "florida!" and he responded "well then you've missed your turn". yep, we had managed to get lost in a canal. more than just a little embarassing.
we quickly corrected our mistake and transited our first lock, the "thomas j. o'brien". continuing down the canal we reached our destination for the evening, marine services marina. it was a nice marina with a large entrance and we had an easy tie on the face of c dock, but during the approach we wrapped a line around our port prop and suddenly we were locked in reverse and headed for a row of docked boats. mac shut down the engines and we all scrambled and managed to tie off another boat which stopped us short of demolishing a few unsuspecting boats.
scot saved the day by diving under our boat, with no mask, tank, or fins and managed to find the line and remove it from the prop.
problem fixed, the day was saved and we enjoyed a quiet evening.
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