Dolton, IL to Joliet, IL

Published out of sequence - from Tuesday 9/27/15

This second day brought us through more of the most ugly industrial river "back yards" than I ever though existed. While I knew that this part of the trip is always panned by all travellers as nasty and depressing, I didn't realize the extent until I saw it with my own two eyes.

There wasn't much that was photo worthy, but a couple exceptions are noted below.

Here is the shots of the beginning and end sign to let you know it is no longer hazardous to touch the water.

Actually, that's not really true! It is just that these signs mark the dreaded electrical fish barrier designed to keep Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes.

This section of the river (two miles or so) is electrified with high voltage and none of the fish can survive swimming through..

As far as they know, it has worked so far.

"Beauty" was from Algonac, MI and had covered over 900 miles of their journey going down to the Bahamas for the winter.

She carried her mast aboard and, in hindsight, might have shipped it to Mobile if the owners had known the costs.

On our way to Dolton, we had gone through the Thomas J. Obrien lock which was almost a non-event. It was only a 2' drop and only exists to ensure that all flow from Chicago carries everything toward the Mississippi River and on to the Gulf of Mexico and not into Lake Michigan.

In this lock, we used the conventional method of looping a line around a bollard at the top of the lock and played out line until the two foot drop was accomplished.

Coming down to the Lockport Lock, we were in for an entirely different scenario.

Let's just say that between poor communications, an irritated and impatient lockmaster, a very strong wind creating bad conditions in the lock and other factors, our 3 1/2 hours tied up outside waiting to get into the lock was capped off by 1/2 hour or so which was very uncomfortable.

There was a large powerboat which went in rafted up to a tow with barges which was already on the port wall. We went in as directed and sent toward the far end of the lock. When we got to the floating bollard, we realized that we couldn't attach to it midships since we would have been too close to the forward doors.

The lockmaster directed us to attach the bow to the bollard (very bad idea!) and we asked him to drop a line down because we had already noticed that the strong winds were starting to push the stern over toward the other side of the lock.

When is was dropped, it was attempted to be attached to the midship cleat (instead of the stern cleat which would probably have worked).