The Thirteenth Plague

We headed back to Chicago early on the morning of Father’s Day. Somewhere off the shore of Michigan we hit a pocket where the high and low pressure systems meet: this is where the black flies hide. Mazurka was overcome with thousands of flies of all natures – tiger and leopard print, big and small, fast and slow, all of them biting. There were everywhere, dying by the hundreds, feasting on each others’ carcasses and us. We rinsed the boat again and again to no avail. No insect repellant or thick clothing could hold them off; finally, we came inside, where the relief was that you only had to swat one or two at a time, rather than a hundred.

For the rest of the day, every slight tickle got a swat.

When we were within an hour from shore, and could see the downtown skyline, we heard over Channel 16, “Mayday! Mayday!”

Mark turned it up; we leaned in closer.

The Coast Guard out of Monroe Harbor responded, asking for the nature of the problem.

“I’m stuck,” the guy replied.

“What do you mean, you’re stuck?” the Coast Guard answered.

There was no response. The Coast Guard called for them repeatedly. No response. Finally, the boater called again, “Mayday! Mayday! I’m stuck!”

The Coast Guard answered again, asking for the location and nature of the problem.

“I’m off Fullerton Harbor,” the boater said (there is no Fullerton Harbor, but we imagine he was somewhere just north of downtown). “The engine just shut off. I tried to get it going, but it won’t start. I’m stuck.”

“Are you taking on any water?” the Coast Guard asked.

“Negative.”

The Coast Guard then asked the boater to switch to a different channel. We switched along with them. “First time in my life I ever heard somebody call mayday,” Dad said.

On Channel 22, the boater described how he couldn’t start the engine, and he was afraid to try – he feared taking in air. (??) At that point, the Coast Guard asked him for his cell phone number so they could call him privately.

But we knew the rest of the story; he ran out of gas.

“Who runs out of gas on the lake?” Dad asked.

I looked at the captain. “I’m sure no one on this boat.”

Day 3 of Fishing

Standing on the bow at dawn with my Dad, he proclaims on the third day of fishing: “From what I can tell, these are ideal conditions for fishing. 1) You’ve got a falling barometer. 2) The wind is from the Southeast. 3) The water looks good.”

It was a nice theory, particularly after two days of not catching anything.

Our first morning in South Haven, Mark and Dad did some reconnaissance, learning that nobody at in the Harbor knew much about fishing at all, and that the nearest place to buy a fishing license was the Walmart two miles away. Thus the benefits of taking your house with you turtle-style wherever you go showed through once again – we were able to buy our licenses online and print them out without ever leaving the boat. We headed out at noon that day – far too late for any real fish to bite, but enough to learn the lay of the land. We found a steady increase in depth and no salmon; in the late afternoon we headed closer to shore for some perch, but found nothing. Another boat pulled alongside us. “We saw you were parked here for an hour and hoped you were getting something,” they called. We shook our heads and didn’t say much.

On Day 2, Mark and Dad got up early enough to follow out the charter captains, hoping to get some insight into the key fishing spots. Again, we returned home empty-handed.

That evening, Mark and I took a walk around downtown South Haven in search of ice cream and information. He sweet-talked a nice lady charter captain who told him that we were doing all the right things, even using the right green “mountain dew” lures, except that the dipsy-divers should not be off-set; as it was, they weren’t going deep enough to catch the salmon. She also said that they were catching fish – not a lot, but some.

That night, there was serious discussion of the fish to be caught.











Day 3. We had done all the research, and now we had this last bit of information that would ensure the salmon would be ours for the reeling. (There is a lot of reeling to be done when you’re casting out more than five hundred feet of line – as evidenced by the black and blue marks in my thigh from bracing the pole.)

It did seem like a fortuitous morning. And the hours wore on…the gear was spread about… we were calling out the depth changes every five feet…and no fish.

Not to say that the day was without excitement. About 11 AM I was inside on the phone to my brother Jim, trying to get his advice for these fish, when I hear some ruckus on deck and somebody call, “It’s the DNR!” I came out to find a green boat with CONSERVATION on the side saddling up to Mazurka. I raced back inside for our licenses and passed them around, all of us waving them. The two guys from the Department of Natural Resources nod at us – oh yeah, we see you got your internet licenses, they say. I’m still on the phone with Jim, narrating this shake-down. “Ask them where the fish are!” he tells me. “Where are the fish??” I yell out. But the two DNR guys just look at me and laugh. “They’re here,” they say. “Somewhere.”

Somewhere. Somewhere is actually a place in time, not in the Lake. ‘Cause when we got back to Chicago and I talked to Mark’s brother Scott, another fisherman, he said the one thing we have no control over: the king salmon don’t start coming in till August.

The Captain and His First Mate

Let’s Go A-Courtin’

We happened to be in South Haven for “Harbor Days,” when the town sets up a stage alongside the Black River for concerts at the mouth of Lake Michigan, and the place is full of parties. At night, people take their zodiacs out and go visiting, sort of like a modern Victorian gentility. Except in this century, you gotta wear a life jacket.

Everything but the Campfire

Last Wednesday night our crew arrived at the South Haven Harbor after traveling all day across Lake Michigan.


The harbor was closing up for the night, just in time to assign us our slip alongside the sailboats rather than the powerboats. “Those guys like us,” Mark said, “’cause we’re not that far from a sailboat. And they’re all thinking about trawlers, anyway.”

I let Hunter and Leo roam around on the deck, taking their tour of boats. One by one, they would board each boat, wander around the deck, then move on to the next. Leo found a sailboat that was open (the owners were at dinner) and disappeared inside for nearly an hour. I could see him through the top hatch, sniffing everything. There’s only a slight problem that I can’t board the boats my cats feel more than welcome to explore – I stand on the dock, calling to them, shaking their treat can, utterly ignored.

The next night, after a fruitless search for salmon and perch – “Is anybody catching anything out there?” our fellow fishermen called helplessly on the radio – we docked and had dinner after sunset. Our neighbors brought around their chairs and we chatted it up.

And just as Mark observed, the sailors liked us trawler-owners. We are not hard-and-heavy power boaters; we only go 7 miles an hour at the most.

Late that night, the sailors confessed they had always wanted a trawler. Mark gave them the tour, and along the way, he’s telling them tales of what went wrong with each piece. “And here’s the engine room, the battery chargers…you know, I made an expensive mistake with those battery chargers. I thought they weren’t charging my batteries – I thought the batteries were dead – I went through three new batteries before I realized I had to turn the damn thing on….” (The story of owning a boat, truly, is narrated by all the things that have gone wrong with it.) They’re all laughing, and then they tell their own stories with battery chargers, leaving them off so the refrigerator is not powered, the sump pump not powered, the batteries drained so low they have to rush out and buy distilled water.

My mom, sitting beside me in her pajamas, waiting for them to leave as it was nearly midnight, turned to me and said, “I have no idea what they’re talking about, do you?”

“Yes,” I told her, “Because I lived through it.”

But I can only tell you certain things about it. I can’t tell you the power of the generator, or which wire goes where, or even where the battery charger is and which of the countless Where’s-Waldo items down there are the batteries. I’m just not that interested. But I can tell you what it was like to watch Mark try to coordinate getting three 80 lb batteries from Monroe Street into the tender boat and onto Mazurka in the pinpointing heat of late July.

It grates me, just a bit, that I fit into the gender stereotype of the wife who doesn’t know nothing about those li’l electronic thingys. My training in that area ended in junior high when I built a pencil holder and earned an A in shop class. I’m sure I could learn, if I got a manual and muddled my way through it. Which is exactly what Mark and all these other boaters do – you keep making mistakes till one of the mistakes is right, and then you learn how to do it. Then you can tell your friends about the time you turned the battery charger off and your wife was upset because she had no refrigeration on board.

“Oh, you mean your husband’s boat,” is what the Westrec guy said to me when I called about the money they were trying to squeeze out of us. I bristled but let it go, though I wanted to say something like, “No, MY boat – I live here, too.” And I suppose in some matrimonial sense it is my boat, but really, I would never live here were it not for Mark. I would never cruise across Lake Michigan on this terrific vacation, I’d never live downtown lakefront Chicago, I’d never do any of this.

It’s kind of weird to let somebody else be responsible for your good time. Maybe that’s a good question to consider about the person you want to marry. If you relinquished control and let them be responsible for your good time, would they make sure you had fun? And could you do the same?

Misery is a Choice

The night before we left on our epic Father’s Day fishing excursion, our crew (Mark, myself, my parents John and Pam) dropped anchor in front of the John Hancock Building, thinking it would be fun to sleep downtown and watch sunrise as we sailed for South Haven in the morning. We cleaned up the kitchen, turned out the lights, hunkered down, and then…

Slosh slosh slosh – a moment of calm – slosh slosh slosh – clang clang clang - clinking of glasses in the cupboards as they were thrown side to side – moment of calm – slosh slosh slosh –

I would fall asleep for the still moment, only to be jerked awake by the next hit. It wasn't the calm, soothing rocking of the rolling seas; it was a downright assault.

“I don’t think I can sleep like this,” I told Mark.

“Me neither.”

Slosh slosh slosh.

“Are my parents asleep?”

“I think so.”

Clang clang clang.

“We’re getting echo waves off shore,” Mark said.

Slosh slosh slosh.

“Do you want to go back to Belmont Harbor?” he asked.

“No. It’s too much trouble. If my parents are sleeping, I can get through it, too.”

“I’ll go start the engine. You stay here.”

I lay in bed – slosh slosh slosh – clang clang clang – calm – slosh slosh slosh – as Mark started up the engine. I heard Dad go up top and the two of them pulling up the anchor. I was so tired I didn’t even both to get up and help. We rocked our way back to Belmont Harbor, and the last thing I remember was the stillness of being tied to the dock, and then sleep.

The next morning, the sun was high over the horizon by the time we got up. “I’d never been so glad as when I heard Mark start that engine,” my Mom told us while the coffee brewed. “I thought for sure I was going to upchuck.” Mark and Dad relayed the madness that went on while the two of us stayed in bed; the coolers being thrown from side to side, and both of them crawling across the deck so as not to lose their balance.

Nobody was earning any badges for enduring unnecessary hardship on this excursion. By 10 o’clock, we were cruising across calm waters to South Haven.

The Sweet Sound of Success

Today, for the first time in more than nine months, Mark started up the generator…and it ran. And ran and ran and ran. My laptop is running on generator power even as I type this.

The culprit, at the end of this long epic battle to find the needle in the haystack? The fuel filter. In the filter, which cleans the diesel before it reaches the generator, a blockage had formed in the filter housing that was creating a vapor lock and preventing fuel from getting to the generator.

In other words, the fuel filter needed to be taken off, disassembled and put back together.

Cost of a Racor fuel filter: $80
Cost of figuring out this problem for nine months: $1300
Cost of a new generator: $15,000

Cost of telling previous repair guy that we didn’t actually have to shell out for a new generator? Yeah…exactly.

White Squall

One of the few movies Mark has on board (we don’t have a TV – we watch movies on our laptops) is White Squall, about a sailing ship with a crew of teenage boys captained by Jeff Bridges. They encounter a huge storm at sea and some of the crew die, including the captain’s wife. This movie is very vivid in my mind.

Lately – especially as we prepare to take my parents on a five-day fishing trip – I’ve been asking Mark questions like, “If we start to sink, how soon until we know? Would we have enough time to blow up the zodiac?”

My main concern is that, if an emergency happens, I will know what to do and what to tell everyone else on board – so I can remain calm, and the captain remains calm, and nobody freaks out as we’re putting on life vests and jumping into the zodiac and firing off flares. My other concern is that we save our feline crewmates, and putting them in the zodiac seems the best option.

Off the coast of Chicago, the concern is not so bad, as the playpen area in front of the John Hancock, for instance, is only about 12 feet deep. If we started to sink, we would just bring everybody up to the fly bridge and wait for the Coast Guard, who would probably arrive before the water even reached our feet.

The established emergency plans all include #1 – put on life jackets, #2 – call for help.

If the Coast Guard stops you, for instance, one of the first things they look for is a life preserver for each person on board. (We’ve actually had to stop and borrow lifejackets from fellow boaters when our guests exceeded our number of preservers.)

So we came up with a plan in case of emergency while underway: put on life preservers, radio the Coast Guard our coordinates, blow up the zodiac, hop in and fire off flares. And wait.

Last week on the way to work we were discussing our emergency plan options. Underway, the only way to tell that we’re sinking is if we actually run into something and start to take visibly take on water. “The real threat is that we would sink at the dock,” Mark said, describing the six places water can get into the boat, via the hull fittings at both toilets, the propeller drive shaft, heater intake, engine intake, and generator intake.

I found a recent study by an insurance company of 150 sinking claims the sites for every boat that sinks while underway, four boats sink at the dock in their slips. “Most recreational boats spend considerably more time at the dock unattended than they do underway. Silly problems like a bad bilge pump, or loss of shore power or a weak battery are sufficient to make a boat sink, even in waters that are only six feet deep.”

That afternoon about 2 pm, oddly enough, Mazurka’s alarm system called Mark’s phone. He called the Harbor office, and they did a quick check: there was water leaking inside. Mark sped home to find an inch of water in the salon. The drinking water filter beneath the sink (which he had just fixed the weekend prior with super-duper glue, “That’s not going to leak anymore,” he said) had burst, and the line was leaking water everywhere. He shut off the water, mopped it up, and returned to work, very upset.

It took a couple days to get the right piece to fix the line. In the meantime, I went outside to get water for coffee at a spigot. We kept the water off, except when washing dishes and showering, and then we kept a bucket under the sink to collect the runoff.

Adapt, overcome, improvise.

And just for fun, Mark bought a radio that will broadcast our GPS coordinates to the Coast Guard if we activate it.

Restaurant Hopping on the Water

My friend Betsy tagged me with a “meme” – a chain letter for blogs. The objective is to name the top 5 restaurants in your city. I immediately wrote my landlocked list (Café Blossom for sushi, Wishbone for Southern & soul food, Chicago Diner for vegetarian, Las Pinatas for Mexican, Angelina’s for dessert – chocolate pound cake…mmm…– and a tie between Hackney’s and Edgewater Tap for American bar food – okay, that’s six). But then I thought again. The theme of this blog is newlywed life on Mazurka…so I gotta go with restaurants you can reach by waterways when you’re in love.

1. Japonais, 600 W. Chicago, is really pricey sushi, with lots of shi-shi girls in swanky tank tops and fake tans posing with cosmos at the bar. But imagine you’re on a second date with a guy who owns a boat: he’s going to take you out on a Friday night. “There’s this sushi place up the river I’ve always wanted to go to,” he tells you. You’re game, ‘cause this guy fascinates you. You climb on board and he cruises up river to the wall outside a restaurant where a lot of young guys in overpriced suits are smoking cigars. This is not a dock or a port, but he pulls up anyway, ties up, and you two hop over the railing. The guys in cigars look impressed. You go right in, wearing sweatshirts and blue jeans, but they seat you anyway, at the very end of the sushi bar nearest the kitchen. At the end of the dinner, you prance right out to the boat, where cigar-smoking guys are admiring the ship. You hop the fence, untie, and push off.

Did it really matter what the food tasted like?

2. Dick’s Last Resort, 435 E. Illinois, is described by NFT (Not for Tourists Guide to Chicago) as “Tourists’ last memory of the night.” It no doubt is, nestled right into the magnificent mile in between conglomerate hotels and 8-floor shopping meccas. It’s also situated right on the Ogden Slip, a small inlet of water just west of Navy Pier, north of the Chicago River. Last year, on the first day we tore the shrinkwrap off Mazurka in cold, chilling April, we took a cruise down the river, up into the Ogden Slip, where we docked and walked around downtown. We decided to spend the night there, and since it was so early in the season, nobody said anything. In the morning, we went to Dick’s Last Resort for brunch, where you can throw things and write on the walls. It was a pretty good brunch buffet. Then we climbed onboard and cruised home.

3. The Green Dolphin, at Webster and Ashland, I have mixed feelings about. This is where we cruised to have dinner with our friends Jay and Lynn the night we spotted the South Loop coyotes. This is also where, two days later, we chose to dock and pick up Birthday Girl Kathy’s 27 friends. The owner – or whoever he was – was none too happy; he tromped down to the dock and gave mighty hell to our captain. “This isn’t a public dock – you better call somebody – we gotta private party here tonight.” He then went and locked the gate so that Kathy had to go up and sweet-talk him into letting in the last few party guests. But as far as dinner goes, the dock is easy and safe, they have a terrific chef (the tuna is excellent), a killer wine selection, and afterwards, you can go into the lounge and listen to awesome jazz.

4. Reza’s, 432 West Ontario, is an outstanding Middle Eastern place I’ve eaten at a hundred times, in the River North area, as well as its northern little brother in Andersonville. It’s terrific. We usually go by motorcycle. You can probably get there by boat. Or take a taxi. The food will be just as good. (Mark and I had our first fight here – he wanted me to tell him a story like the main character in Out of Africa and I went blank. I spent a half hour hiding in the bathroom, giving myself a pep talk in the mirror not to walk out on him. Ah, young love.)

5. Bob Chin’s – now defunct – it used to be right next to Mark's favorite Italian place Sorriso’s, also defunct. I’ll be honest – I’ve never eaten dinner here. But I feel compelled to list it as a place on water to fall in love, because four years ago my best friend Jill had her first date with Scott here, aboard his brother Mark’s boat, which at that time was Mazurka’s predecessor, the Escape Hatch. They docked and ordered mounds of crab legs, which Jill hadn’t a clue how to eat. “I look around and everybody’s just opening them up like they know what they’re doing…I had no idea.” Scott ended up cracking the crab legs for her. “There was nothing pretentious about her,” he says, “She just was who she was. It was refreshing.” Two years later, they got married in Michigan. I stood up for Jill, Mark stood up for Scott. That’s how we met. (At their wedding, Jill’s Aunt Karen suggested perhaps I date the best man. “They’re good people,” she said, “They’re water people.”) A year after that, Mark and I got married. Jill stood up for me; Scott stood up for Mark. They had just learned they were pregnant. On May 3rd, 2007, their daughter Sophia was born.


Mark, Jill, Scott, Felicia, August 2005


(Part of the meme game is to tag other bloggers. I tag Mary, Kristin, Jenny.

Nicole (Sydney, Australia)
velverse (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
LB (San Giovanni in Marignano, Italy)
Selba (Jakarta, Indonesia)
Olivia (London, England)
ML (Utah, United States)
Lotus (Toronto, Canada)
tanabata (Saitama, Japan)
Andi (Dallas [ish], Texas, United States)
Lulu (Chicago, Illinois, United States)
Chris (Boyne City,
Michigan, United States)
AB (Cave Creek, Arizona,
United States)
Johnny Yen (Chicago,
Illinois, United States)
Bubs (Mt Prospect,
Illinois, United States)
Mob (Midland, Texas United States)
Yas (Ahwatukee, Arizona USA)
Alicia(Idaho Falls, Idaho, USA)
Tug(Hell, Colorado,
USA)
BondMemphis, TN, USA)
TopChamp
(Glasgow, UK)
Kailani
(Honolulu, HI, USA)
Amber
(Henderson, TN, USA)
the weirdgirl (San Francisco Bay Area, CA,  USA (I'm still pretending to be an anonymous blogger))
CoffeeBetsy
(Moline, IL USA)
Life Aboard Mazurka
(Chicago, Illinois, USA)

Our Weekend Itinerary

My friends are passing around emails about the hundreds of fun, free things happening this weekend in Chicago. Like the Chicago Blues Festival, the Old Town Arts Fair, and the Printer's Row Book Fair.

I love this itinerary. I would love it even more if my itinerary for the weekend weren't the following:

Fill up fuel tank
Fix generator
Change transmission oil
Finish touching up varnish
Change generator oil
Clean out office/bow of boat so my parents have a place to sleep
Clean the front bathroom so they can have some privacy
Clean the stateroom
Take everything extraneous to storage
Scrub everything in site
Vacuum the cats

Can you tell my parents are coming to visit? We’re taking them on a five-day Father’s Day fishing trip across Lake Michigan and down the coast of Michigan back to Chicago.

The View from Our Front Door

“I have to tell Mark he’s not a bachelor and he can’t do this anymore,” was my first thought Sunday morning, awaking at 4 AM to pouring rain and my husband and our friend Carl discussing the air conditioner.

I called out to them, “You guys aren’t seriously fixing the air conditioner now, are you?”

No, not fixing the air conditioner, but preparing to go fishing, which I had agreed to as well. Not because I like getting up that early, or because I’m wild about fishing. But I liked the crew (Jeff and Carl) and if you don’t go out early-morning fishing while you live on a boat, what’s the point?

We had gotten home late that Saturday night, after attending Carl’s annual crawfish boil/margatini extravaganza. When we invited him to go fishing with us, he stopped the tequila and switched to beer, but we honestly didn’t know if he’d show up or not. Sure enough, 4 AM, he’s at the door in the pouring rain.

Mark was already up, trying to figure out what is wrong with the air conditioner, which keeps freezing. Carl hadn’t even been to sleep – he cleaned up his party and came straight to ours. Jeff arrived shortly, telling tales of the strange activity you see in Chicago alleys at 4:30 in the morning.


We set sail at 5:30 and headed out at 60 degrees, watching the city skyline disappear behind us.



In an hour or so we hit a depth of 75 feet – a ledge that drops off to 100’ depth, and they cast their lines. Half the sky was rainy, the other half sunny. We had calm waters. And not much happening.
























I have little patience for fishing, unless they’re biting. As a kid I would bring a book with me when I went out in the boat with my dad, or ice skates along in the winter. But when you’re fishing from your house, things are different. I made everybody breakfast, did some work, cleaned up. I took a chair out to the bow with a book and a blanket. It was the first time I had ever been surrounded by 360 degrees of water.

It was awesome.

Did we just come from a city? I couldn’t recall.

Only Carl caught a fish that made it into the boat: a coho salmon.



















But we arrived back at Belmont exhilarated. When you free yourself from the constraints of land, you free yourself from all the land-locked worries: bills and work and obligations and all the other daily worries that weigh us down. When you’re surrounded by water, you’re alone, and also acutely aware that you’re part of something much bigger.

There’s still so much about this boat that I don’t know. It’s full of surprises, and changes all of a sudden, depending on the environment.

Like the view from our front door.

I Spy

When Mark is working on Mazurka, the boat starts to look like one of those children’s puzzles where you have to find things.


Find the power drill. Find the broccoli. Find the clown.

Find the captain.