They're Back

It's March...it's mating season.

The Cheneys are back.

I'll let you know how it goes with Mark's elaborate plan for a chicken-wire-tulip-design in their nesting area. But these are hardy fowl. They survived the pin pricks, the ammonia spray, and constant harrassment by visitors with umbrellas. I don't have much hope that this season will be any different.

Get Out Your Dustpan

I've long been a fan of snow-shoveling.

Bundling up, trekking outdoors, pushing snow around with heavy, non-technical tools like shovels, and the satisfaction of a driveway cleared and a job well-done.

This winter I emailed my dad, who lives three hours west of us and can give me the most accurate weather report of what's about to hit. "Got snow?" I asked.

"Get your dust pans ready," he replied.

The only thing more satisfying than shoveling the deck with a dustpan is going up under the shrinkwrap and beating the plastic so the snow slides off.

It's been a constant 70 degrees inside Mazurka, and now the sewage tank is empty, too. Winter life on board seems pretty good this year.

Though Mark is having second thoughts. Last week, after spending nearly four hours with a guy and a van and helping to pump out the sewage tanks of five of our neighbors, my husband confessed, "The novelty is wearing off."

Date Night

Thursday is Date Night - the one night of the week when Mark and I don't schedule anything, and we do something together. Date Night is not always going out - most of the time it's staying home and eating dinner at the table and hanging out.

This week on Wednesday, the red pumpout light signalled it was time to empty the sewage tank.

On Thursday I got home early and decided that I would surprise Mark by taking care of the pumpout by myself. This is not a simple task: we are on the opposite side of the marina as the pumpout hose, and since we can't start the boat and drive on over to the sewage system, we have devised an odd method that, for the most part, works pretty well:

1) Toss one end of the water ski rope 30 feet across the marina to the other dock. (This sometimes takes several tries.)

2) Walk a quarter mile around to the other dock and attach the rope to the pump out hose.

3) Walk back to Mazurka, use the ski rope to pull the pumpout hose across the marina, attach the hose to the port.

4) Walk back to the other side of the marina (or, call one of our neighbors docked on that side) and turn on the sewage pump.

(Are you getting tired of walking back and forth yet?)

5) When the monitor onboard Mazurka reads empty, walk back (or call again) to turn off the sewage pump.

6) Unhook the hose from Mazurka; walk back to the other side to drag the hose across.

Sound exhausting? It is. With two people, you can eliminate the walking back and forth, which saves you 20 minutes. Still, I thought it would be sweet for Mark to come home and find that I had done the job already, and all by myself!

I got the rope across the marina on my first swing - this was a good sign. Problem was, we've had a lot of snow around here lately. The hoses were not only buried under the snow, but one was frozen in a heap of black ice created by plows. One of our neighbors came out to help me dislodge the hose, and we put them together and I ran around to Mazurka and began hauling the hose across the water. It was heavier than normal. After a lot of tugging, I was just getting the hose hooked up to Mazurka when Mark arrived.

With the hose hooked up, we were almost home free. But it wasn't pumping. The reason the hose was so heavy? It was frozen inside. So for about an hour, Mark tended to the hose in the river, waiting for it to thaw. When it finally thawed, he tried it again - still not pumping. So back to the other side of the marina he went, where he and two of our neighbors commenced to pulling apart the sewage system to try and figure out the problem.

Date Night this week looked like the captain in the sewer for two hours, and the first mate in the boat feeling sorry for herself.

Two days later, and River City maintenance is apparently trying to fix the problem. And yes, our sewage tank is still full.

Not What I Wanted to See

Monday afternoon I came home for lunch and as I'm making a salad, I catch sight of somebody's legs outside our door on the dock.

I took a closer look - white guy, mid 40s, balding, standing there, looking around. This is not all that unusual - people will sometimes come out to take pictures of the loop, or just get a view of the river.

But the next thing I know, he's unzipping his jeans and pulling out a body part I have no business looking at.

I open the door and yell, "Hey!" catching him mid-piss, a yellow puddle collecting in the snow right outside our door.

He jumps and puts it away and runs off. As he's high-tailing it down the dock, I hear him calling to one of our neighbors, "I thought you were the only one out here!"

A little later our neighbor comes by to borrow some shrink wrap tape. "Sorry I scared your friend," I told him. "Maybe I should have invited him in to use the head."

Note to those of you helping your boater friends this winter: No matter how appealing it may be to pee on the middle of a dock smack downtown Chicago, try to use some discretion. You never know who's front walkway you're pissing on.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Last night we may as well have been swinging 'round a mooring can in Monroe Harbor.

We arrived home just in time to watch the blizzard winds whipping Mazurka like a flimsy flag, pounding her port-side bow against the dock, the new fender busted off its hook and floating down the Chicago River.

When docked on the Chicago River, lines have to be kept somewhat loose; the water level changes so suddenly and dramatically (it's not unusual for the level to drop or rise three feet in an hour), that lines pulled tight can inflict a lot of damage. So with loose lines, and extra fenders out, we whipped back and forth all night long. Mark got up twice to check the port-side, fix the fenders, keep an eye on the tearing shrinkwrap.

Around 2:30 I thought about going out to help him in sub-zero temperatures; then I had the thought which still comes up occasionally: "It was your dream to live like this," and I burrowed down and went back to sleep.

This morning, it's zero degrees, but we're still floating.

Captain's Log

Mark's favorite Christmas present this year - the only one deemed worthy of a photo - was a gift from my Dad, the "Captain's Log." There have been plenty of jokes about stardate and all that.

Yesteday it earned its first entry - when ice formed around the bow and Mark turned on the de-icer, a powerful fan that extends from the dock under Mazurka and circulates water around the boat.

And other than that, the coldest weekend of the year has had little affect on the boat. The captain covered all the inside windows with clear plastic, and we are a delightful 71 degrees. "The only thing that made it a little cold is that my wife chose this weekend to go out of town," Mark told a friend yesterday.

1:00 AM and All's Well

Winter months can be slow onboard a boat. For about five months, we are locked into a slip, wrapped in plastic, sitting. Mazurka becomes just like any other home, except for the intermittent rolling caused by a passing river barge.

Onboard cabin fever takes a slightly different spin than on land. We fall into a rut of anticipation…at any moment, disaster may appear. You have to be ready.

And sometimes, when cabin fever is especially bad, captains and first mates may invent problems.

Like the other night, when I was awoken by Mark in the saloon, waving a flashlight everywhere, opening the hatches and yelling in a panicked voice, “Wake up! There’s water all over the floor! The boat’s leaking!”

The boat wasn’t leaking, but the vase of star lilies on the table was, knocked over by one of our feline crewmembers.

I always give the captain a hard time about his middle-of-the-night anxiety. At least once a week (depending on the amount of stress at work), he’ll be up, rounding the cabin, looking for signs that the heat is out or the bilge is overflowing.

This week Mark was gone and I spent a windy, wintry night on Mazurka alone. Around 1 AM I was awoken by a loud thud at the stern, right behind my head. I lay quietly for a moment, listening for the inevitable leaking water of a sinking boat. Then I got up, put on my robe and boots, and ventured out into the cold night.

The South Loop is sometimes a miracle – in the heart of downtown Chicago, there can be moments of absolute stillness. The stars and half moon lit the dock, and there were no sounds of construction, no humming of electricity; just me, the river, the geese wintering on the nearby dock (yes, they’re still here), and then – THUD! – the port side of the bow swung and nearly slammed right into the dock. It would have hit, too, had the cracked fender not buffered the impact.

I watched is slam again, judged that Mazurka was in no danger of sinking, and went back to bed.

If a busted fender is the only thing we have to fix this winter, I’ll consider it karmic payback for surviving last winter.

Mele Kalikimaka

Hawaii was good to these boaters. We took a break from marine methods of travel in favor of bicycles, backpacks, and motorcycles.


The Ne Pali Coast - 11 miles of rugged terrain climbing 5,000 feet. You bet we conquered it - on foot, carrying 35-lb backpacks.


For the full story of the epic ten-day adventure, check out the January 13th Sunday Sun-Times Travel Section.

"Thanks for putting up with me...

…I know it’s not your typical way of living in the city.”

Mark tells me this Sunday night as we’re walking to dinner, after a weekend full of winter preparations. Saturday was spent building the shrinkwrap structure (similar to a barn raising minus the teams of Amish to help), wrapping the boat in plastic, and waving a blowtorch to shrink the plastic. This year, we waited to buy the shrinkwrap until five inches of snow had fallen – which meant that all the rolls of 26x100 were gone, and we had to settle for 20x100. Seeing as Mazurka has a beam of 13 (the width across), 20 was cutting it close. (A little too close – we got creative with some tape in the bow.)

Note to wanna-be live aboards: shrinkwrap your boat before it snows, before it’s 20 degrees, before the sleet and freezing rain and plummeting temperatures make the 8-hour job almost unbearable.

By Sunday, there was more plastic to shrink, and then chores like filling the water tanks. Mazurka holds 150 gallons of fresh water, and we need to refill every 10 days or so. In the summer at Belmont Harbor, this is easy; you take the hose hung beside your boat, connected to the spigot beside your boat, you turn the water on. In the winter, docked on the wrong side of the marina, this job is a bit more complicated; the spigot is all the way on the other side of the marina, beside the condo building. There are no fewer than seven hoses that link together and snake along the docks, through the river, and up to our dock, and if just one of these hoses is not emptied properly, the remaining water will freeze, making it impossible to fill the tanks – which is exactly what happened. So Mark turned the water on and waited for the hoses to thaw. After our tanks filled, we went through the laborious process of emptying the hoses by draping them all over the marina.

Mark also installed the de-icer, the bubbling fan extended beneath Mazurka, which keeps the water circulating around the boat (and saved us last year when the river froze). There were some other odd jobs in there, too – to be honest, I don’t know what all he did, because by mid-afternoon I was back to my old ways and hiding inside at the computer with coffee and hot soup and two large, furry, personal portable heaters.

Everything is harder in the winter. The basics of filling water tanks and emptying sewage tanks (especially when the pump out hose bursts on a cold Wednesday night) are hard enough without battling the elements of snow and ice. This is about the time when I start asking, “Why are we doing this again?”

I have come up with three reasons:

1) I like adversity and battling the elements, the worse the better;
2) There’s something very comforting about settling down into a warm, protected cabin on the water, while the wind and snow and ice blow outside;
3) Living on a boat is cool, no matter what time of year.

Still, we’re both ready for a vacation – maybe some place tropical, maybe with backpacks and bicycles, maybe this Friday….

A Good Reason to Wrap Early

Who knew it would snow on December 5th?

All Wrapped Up for the Holidays

The River Rats (and other Rodents) love this time of year for decorating.


Find Mazurka in her holiday gift wrapping.

Ol' Man Winter Flexes

Last week I called my mom and told her we were getting ready for winter.

"Oh that's a pain," she said, "changing out all the summer clothes for winter ones."

That's not even the half of it.

If you are considering living onboard a boat in winter in CHICAGO, of all places, here is what you will need to prepare:

1. Plastic for the inside windows
2. An electric heater
3. A diesel furnace
4. 3-4 space heaters to put around the boat
5. Colored lights (if you're feeling festive)
6. Super strong duct tape to seal up every vent (and there are many)
7. Strips of grey sponge with adhesive backs to seal up the cracks around doors and anything else
8. Shrinkwrap. This is a whole 'nother chapter and future blogs will include a complete lesson in how to build a structure and then wrap your boat in plastic and shrink the plastic tight as a drum with the equivolant of a flame thrower.

We learned a lot last year, especially when the Chicago River froze and Mazurka was locked in the ice like Shackleton's Endurance. We learned so much that PassageMaker Magazine (THE trawler and ocean motorboat magazine) is going to feature an article about our adventures in its January/February issue.

Here's hoping we avoid a repeat performance this year.

You Wanna Put it Where?

Ever since the laundry fiasco, the captain has been obsessed about getting a washer and dryer for the boat. He’ll wake up at 4 AM and start researching them online. When we come home at night, the first thing he does is get the tape measure and start measuring areas in the forward cabin, near the bathroom. He’s ready to pull out the counter, cut into the closet, destroy the drawers beneath the bunk. Last weekend when we visited Jill and Scott, they spent all afternoon discussing where it could go. Mind you, they weren’t on the boat – this was all hypothetical. Call it a visualization exercise.

Tonight I’m sitting in my bathroom when I hear Mark just outside with the tape measure. “I think I found a spot,” he says. “In the engine room, where the litter box is. We’d have to find another place for the litter.”

“Are you really going to do this,” I call out to him.

“What – don’t you want it?”

I think for a second. A washer/dryer combo is expensive, bulky, troublesome to install, and quite frankly, I don’t think it’s going to really wash and dry our clothes. There are a million Laundromats in this city. For a drive across the State of Illinois or Michigan, we can do our laundry for free.

“No,” I decide. “It’s not worth the hassle.”

“I just like thinking about where it would go,” Mark says.

I don’t entirely believe him. He has an intensity of thought and a singleness of purpose that is admirable, but could also result in a huge washer/dryer sitting in the middle of the salon, too big to fit anywhere on the boat, reducing our 12 feet of living space to ten. Oh, when you live on a project....

Cruising South for the Winter

For the last few weeks, we have watched Belmont Harbor clear out for the season. It was an especially sad day to see our neighbors aboard the Harbor Dog go; I stood on the dock and waved as Steve and Cindy cruised off toward dry dock.

On Sunday it was our turn. We spent a couple hours packing up Lil Choppin, securing the bikes and plants on board, hauling out the winter lines and putting away the summer ones. Mark organized the lazarette with all our gear. We filled the water tanks, pumped out the sewage, and were on our way.

We were still a little leery of the lake after it claimed three of us last week. The wind had changed direction, so instead of riding rolling waves, we were tossed about in choppy water from all sides. Still, the ride was surprisingly smooth, the weather warm and sunny, and we ate caramel apples as we cruised south for the winter.

We were reticent to leave the trees of Lincoln Park, but we get to trade them in for giants of glass and steel. Now, instead of the constant hum of Lake Shore Drive traffic, we have trains and barges. Instead of watching runners gleefully racing outside on the bike path, I watch runners like rats on treadmills in River City Bally’s. I can sit at my home office and listen to the tour boat guides all day. “And to your left, you’ll see River City, which looks just like the corncob of Marina Towers. That’s no coincidence – they were built by the same architect!” And in the South Loop, we are in the midst of the biggest gentrification this city has ever seen: I counted seven cranes on the skyline yesterday, new condos have gone up over the summer, and we are now within walking distance of the newest, biggest, glossiest Whole Foods in the city. There’s even talk of the property just north of us – the beautiful green space that has survived the jackhammers – finally breaking ground for – you guessed it – more condos.

Hasn’t the housing market fallen through?

Developments like these make the captain nervous – he fears that one day, the whole river will be developed and there won’t be anywhere for live aboards to spend the winter.

By that time, global warming will be in full effect, and the lake will be hospitable year-round.

It’s Nothing Personal

When you live on the water, it’s easy to forget that the lake is not our friend. As much as she means to us – the amazing peace and tranquility and beauty she brings – she is also as vicious and as changeable as a woman scorned. As much as we think we know her, as many years as we may have spent with her, she can turn in a second. We don’t really know her at all.

Our hearts go out to the families of the three experienced sailors who were killed last week in treacherous water, when their sailboat slammed into the breakwater at 95th Street, and to the Chicago Fire Department and the Coast Guard for risking their own safety in the rescue and recovery.

Deep Sea Communication

Every time I climb on board Mazurka, I clutch everything tightly to me - keys, phone, laptop, wallet - because the inevitable can always happen, when making the leap from pier to deck; in the deceptively short six inches of just-a-step, you can lose what you need most.

This has not happened to me yet.

Nor had it happened to Mark, which was somewhat surprising because he has a tendency to lose most everything. Until last Friday morning when he was out on deck, putting out an extra fender and somehow, as he leaned over the railing, the rail knocked into the cell phone holstered to his belt; the phone went flying into the air and landed with a plop into the water below.

He came racing into the cabin. "I dropped my phone in the water. Oh my god, I'm sick about it. It had my whole calendar. I haven't synced in months."

I thought of stories I had heard about people dropping cell phones into stranger places - such as latrines in India - and retrieving the phone, letting it dry out, and finding it worked good as new. I had the same experience when my phone was caught out in the rain. After a day of buzzing, it dried out and I was able to use it. I reassured my husband. "We can get it."

The lucky thing about docking on A Street is that the water is less than six feet deep below us, and often, we can see the bottom. While the salmon fishermen watched us from across the harbor, we attempted to shield the sun so we could see to the bottom - no luck. "I'm just sick about it," Mark kept repeating. "Try the net," I said. "But what will that do?" he asked. "I can't even see it." "Try dredging the bottom," I suggested, "right where you dropped it."

Against his better judgment, he did as I advised. One sweep, nothing. The second sweep, and up came the cell phone. We erupted into cheers, causing the fishermen across the way to wonder if we'd come upon a new method for catching salmon.

I wish I could tell you that in 24 hours the phone was good as new. This is not the case. All of Mark's information from the last six weeks is gone forever to the bottom of Belmont Harbor.

The good news is that, while waiting for his new phone to come, Mark was able to borrow Mazurka's phone, the one that will call him if there's an emergency on the boat. So as long as we don't burst a pipe in the next couple days, we'll be just fine.

It's Snagging Season

The salmon are here.

And so are the fishermen. They surround the boat, jumping the fence and fishing off the piers. From inside Mazurka, it feels like we are under attack.

Wednesday afternoon, I was working at home when I noticed men six feet from our home hurling fishing lines off the piers and vigorously reeling them in. It’s called snagging: the idea is that you throw a heavy lure out and reel in fast, hoping your hook will “snag” a fish. It’s not really fishing, and it’s not legal.

I went outside and chatted up the fishermen; their whole family was standing in front of our boat, watching them. I did some outdoor chores, like filling the water tanks. For the most part, I don’t really care that people jump the fence and fish – that’s their business, and they’re not really hurting anything. Often, they get the point when they see me around – they’re not supposed to be on the docks; they can fish from the other side; they usually leave.

Thursday afternoon, there’s a new set of fishermen. I was cooking dinner, and so I repeated my performance, going outside, doing chores. I asked one guy casting close to us what he was fishing for – he explained the salmon have come in, and in a month they’ll be feeding and you can catch them on lures, but for now, you have to snag them. He says they’re okay to eat because they come from way out in the lake. He was very excited because it was his mother’s birthday, and she loves salmon, and they were going to fix her a surprise salmon dinner.

I watched him snag two fish right in a row, calling to one of his partners (with a whistle sounding eerily similar to calls used on the street to run drugs); his partner came by with his pole, snagged the fish, and they hauled it up together. I asked if I could take their picture; they proudly agreed.

One after another the salmon were snagged, brought in, two or three feet long, and heaved over the fence. The guys worked quickly, like thieves – they began to get greedy, rushing to the end of piers, looting the harbor for all the fish they could snag, while Mark and I sat eating dinner, under siege.

And then somebody spoiled the fun and called the police. Two squad cars showed up. The cops kept two of the guys at the fence for a long time, checking their licenses. One of their teammates evaded the police and lay on the dock, before finally crawling onto the back of a boat and ducking down, waiting. The cops took all their salmon – 7 or 8 long, strong fish – and heaved them over another fence, into the bird sanctuary. It was disappointing and a sad to think of these salmon just a few days earlier, large and free, swimming cold, deep Lake Michigan. And then they made the mistake of coming into Belmont Harbor, snagged by thieving fishermen, thrown as a feast for thieving raccoon.

The hiding fisherman sat on the back of a boat for a very long time, after his friends were let go, while the cops still milled around. By this time we were out on deck, getting ready to push off and head for the pump out dock. The guy on the back of the boat started to get up. I motioned for him to stay put, that the cops were still there. He sat back down quietly.

As we approached the pump out dock, the police had worked their way down the harbor, asking for driver’s licenses, fishing licenses, checking poles and lures. One of them helped us tie up. The fishermen with licenses and legitimate lures were allowed to stay, others had to leave.

It was pretty quiet on our end of the harbor for the rest of the night, but the fishermen stayed throughout the rest of the harbor. At 2 AM, Mark went out to check the bumpers (they had turned in the wind and Mazurka was hitting the dock). When he came back to bed, he described the line of fishermen opposite Mazurka, reeling in fish. This morning at 5:30, the harbor was still teeming.

A Year and a Day

Last summer, when Mark and I were planning our wedding and figuring out where we were going to live, I committed to one year on Mazurka.

I know my patterns. A lot of times, when thrust into a new situation, I fight and kick and scream and try everything I can to escape - until I just surrender, and then I really, really like it. Like Kindergarten. Like Chicago; for the first two years in this city, I wanted to run screaming like it was still on fire. And then I settled down and realized everything this city has to offer and that it's a fantastic place to live.

I thought maybe the same thing would happen with Mazurka, so I promised to live a full year on board. If I hated it after a year, we could move to land.

On September 30th, we celebrated a year of marriage, a year of living together on this boat. And though there have been some challenges (like the river freezing, the heating system going out, the pump-out overflowing, and trying to prove our Chicago residence), not for one second have I wanted to live anywhere else.

I love Mazurka.

I love coming home to nature every day, in the middle of a huge city. I love the transitory nature of our home - that we are meant to move, that nothing is ever intended to be permanent. And I love lying in bed at night, watching the ripples of water reflected on the ceiling above us.

Mazurka has converted me into a true live aboard.

And for our anniversary, we spent the weekend on the move, riding Mark's motorcycle seven hours north to Door County, and island hopping via ferry to Washington Island and Rock Island. Call it reconnaissance for next year's mission to take Mazurka up through Death's Door....

20% Discount

The captain and crew of the Mazurka have been pretty busy these days. Life on a boat is not all recreation – there are jobs to attend, money to earn. So lately, things around the boat have not been so ship-shape. Groceries haven’t been bought, floors haven’t been swept, and the laundry – the laundry has been collecting under stairways for weeks.

In his bachelor days, Mark used to take his laundry to the River City cleaners. When I came on board, I thought $75 for two weeks of laundry was too expensive. Give me a roll of quarters and a few hours and I’ll do it for ten bucks. We also have no shame about doing our laundry at our parents’ and siblings’ houses.

On a recent deceptively-free afternoon, I tore off the quilt and comforters, stuffed them into a bag, and proclaimed the laundry would be done. That was a week ago. Since then we have been slumbering under a sleeping bag, the laundry spilling around us. Mark had suggested taking the laundry in to the cleaners, but I refused, saying it cost too much.

By last Saturday morning, there was nothing left to wear. Mark piled everything we had into two huge bags and found a laundry just across Lake Shore Drive. The guy was amazed we lived on a boat, and promised to have it done by Tuesday. He didn’t speak great English, and some things were lost in translation…but he said not to worry, he would take care of everything.

The laundry was a day late. “I’ve never seen so much,” the guy told Mark. “I’m still working on it.”

“What does he have to work on?” I asked Mark. “Just throw it in the washer and dryer and fold it.”

Tonight when I got home, Mark was waiting for me. “Is the laundry here?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “You’ve never seen such clean clothes.” “How much was it?” I asked. “Well,” my husband said, “we’re not taking any vacations for a while.”

I started guessing. “More than $100? More than $200?”

The grand total – at a 20% discount – $380.

What did we get for our $380? An amount which made Mark’s hand shake while he wrote the check, and compelled me to call the launderer and complain that this was dishonest work that we never asked for? What did we get?

Ever single item in those two bags was dry cleaned and ironed, including oven mitts, ball caps, and t-shirts. The launderer worked tirelessly to get oil stains out of Mark’s work clothes and sweat stains out of my running sweatshirt. The sheets were ironed and packed neatly into plastic bags. My underwear was safety pinned to hangers in perfect descending order. This man took more pride in cleaning our laundry than I have for cleaning the entire boat. He even included eleven pages of notes detailing his week’s work.

Our one and only time at Lakefront Cleaners resulted in the cleanest, crispest clothes we have ever had on board.

“Everybody always wants dry cleaning,” the launderer told me on the phone, apologizing (but not offering any money back – after all, he had the check in hand). “Next time I will know what you want.”

There won’t be a next time for Lakefront Cleaners. We’re going back to rolls of quarters and waiting for 25 cent washers. It’s worth three hours of my time.

A Day at the Races

For the past four years, Mazurka has served as safety boat for the Flatwater Classic, the annual canoe and kayak race down the Chicago River. Sponsored by Friends of the River, the race starts on the north side at Addison, winds its way south through downtown, and crosses the finish line in Chinatown.

This year, we had not one, but three safety boats. Mark captained the Mazurka; Carl captained his zodiac raft; and I captained our zodiac, fondly named “Li’l Choppin.”

I was excited about being captain. The day before, I pumped water from the little zodiac, which had been sitting out through too many thunderstorms and had collected a good foot of rain. I scrubbed her down, painted on her name and little musical notes. I don’t know what came over me; I’d never yearned to be captain, yet here I was, stroking the little raft the way I watched Mark pat Mazurka.

It’s a love thing, between a captain and a boat.

Race day started early. After receiving our orders, we cruised out with our crew – Sharyl, Scott, Myke, and Carl – before 8:30. We locked through at Navy Pier and took a deep breath – it had been all summer since we’d been on the River. We missed its quiet, calm sense of purpose.

Mark brought Mazurka in front of the Merchandise Mart, and we started setting up the zodiacs with motors and gear. Sharyl was my first mate – a physician on call for the weekend – but with her pager and cell phone, she could answer pages from the water (which she did). We headed north, not quite sure where we were supposed to be – or, to be quite honest, how to drive the boat.



Now wait – I’ve driven the zodiac once. And as a kid my dad used to let me pull the cord on the outboard motor on his 14 ft fishing boat. I mean, I was pretty sure I was going to figure it out. Still, as we were floating away, I called to Mark, “Which one is the throttle?”

After a quick course (outboard motors are forgiving) we secured our location where the river forks, just north of downtown. Our job as safety boat was to keep racers against the west wall, out of the way of huge tour boats and any other crafts coming down the river.



Paddlers descended the river for the next four hours, in everything from long canoes with crews of 20, to a single kayaker bent on winning. (One intense dude ignored our directions to stay to the west, later cursed Mark and Myke and Mazurka for being in his way, and later still tipped his kayak and had to get help from Carl and Scott. I think he lost.) Families came in kayaks and canoes (one mom was towing her daughter’s kayak), construction workers and pirates, and a lone racer standing atop his board, paddling with a long oar.

We refueled once, and when I shut off the motor, we experienced what the racers heard the entire way – the stillness of the River in a huge urban landscape.

And there is something very cool about motoring down the Chicago River towards the Sears Tower and seeing your house floating at the base of so much steel and glass.


At the end, we tied up in Ping Tom Park in Chinatown and celebrated with the racers and volunteers, grateful for this awesome city.

After a day in Li’l Choppin, the captain bite is strong…I think it’s time I learn to parallel park Mazurka.

Bow thrusters, I fear you not.