Our day started just after 8 and ended 9 1/2 hours later when we finally got to tie up on the wall in Joliet, along with 8-10 other Loopers who had arrived before us. It was a long day filled with all kinds of firsts – first drawbridge, first lock, first encounter with barges, first tie up to a wall along a river – and we survived all of them!

Pictures are going to tell my story tonight.

    

Looking back at DuSable Harbor as we left this morning and our first bridge

Bridges and more bridges – I eventually quit counting how many we went under.

Our first lock. We were allowed to float in the middle rather than tie up to the side – it was only a one foot drop, so a baby lock.

Sometimes there were nice things to look at…

and sometimes not so nice. There was a 12 mile stretch with barges on one or both sides of the river.

We had to idle for about 15 minutes while the barge in the middle had to maneuver between the barges on either side of the river. It looked like there wasn’t more than one foot on either side when he finally got positioned to go on through.

These are man made waterfalls designed to aerate and oxygenate the water in the Cal-Sag Channel, because the water was so polluted.

It looks like they moved Mt. Baldhead from Saugatuck MI to the Cal-Sag Channel!

For our second lock we tied a line attached to our boat around a “floating” bollard. The bollard doesn’t really float, but it moves up and down as the water levels change. The line kept our boat in one spot as the bollard went down with the lowering water level in the lock. The guide book says we went down 39 feet!

Tied to the wall in Joliet. We finally got to use the side door to get off the boat – another first! I had to step off the boat onto the top of the wall, then over a big chain fence to get to the sidewalk. And this is the view from our back deck, the Jefferson St drawbridge – not quite like the Chicago skyline.