September 18 to Chicago

Chicago skyline

An auspicious start to our journey to Chicago on Wednesday which began at 6am.  We escaped the rain in Milwaukee but endured 3-5 swells all the way to Chicago where it started to RAIN.  Hard.  But it let up for short time as we wound around Chicago harbor in search of the entrance to the 31st Street Marina which we did find during the lull.

41st Street Marina entrance

Lot of vacant slips

 Swayed by the break in the weather I thought we'd have an easy time just pulling alongside a dock and tying up.  Easy.  As soon as we were in the marina the blue sky disappeared and we were greeted by a thunderstorm with the usual darkness, torrential downpours and strong winds.  We attempted to dock on the T-head of the J dock but only succeeded in soaking Mary after an hour.  Luckily the marina was pretty deserted.  I could never get the boat close enough to the dock for Mary to jump off.  Needless to say it was not our finest hour.  We ended up just pulling into a slip where the wind pushed us against the dock.  Mary suggested a slip on a different dock but we were close to the one we'd been trying to tie up to for the last hour so I made yet another fateful decision went into a slip there.

 The whole marina was pretty vacant.  And I mean several hundred slips of which about 95% were empty.  Desolate. A nice peaceful night ahead right?






And so at 9:30 a 55 foot sea ray blaring Latin music comes into the marina and ... like you can't tell where this is headed ... pulls up, and after several attempts, finally backs into the slip adjacent to us.  Yup.  Nice big boat 4 feet away awash with dancing young people in bikini's, loud
music and lots of alcohol.  Boy, I cant wait to stay here again.

Our boat and our lively neighbor 

Did I really say "young people"?  I must really be getting old!  I should mention it went on all night albeit at a slightly reduced volume after midnight.  I'd have fired up our engines at 6am but figured vengeance was less desirable than at least some semblance of sleep.  So we left at 8am instead of 6am.