Raft On, Venture On!

Every year Mark auctions off a boat ride to raise money for his students. This year, we took the lucky winner Dominic and his friends for the inaugural Saturday fireworks of the Summer 2008 season.

It was a pretty standard trip: fairly calm water, anchoring for hamburgers and potato salad in the playpen, touring around Navy Pier and heading south along the lakefront...



and then we ran into our old friend and fellow River Rat Doug James, Captain of the Venture On.



Venture On is an awesome trawler. Actually, it's more like a two-story house on water, with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an engine room you can stand in (with everything very neatly labeled), and the most complete galley to which any landlubber could aspire. When Captain James hosted the end-of-the season River Rat party, those of us who endure boats with a 13' width (called the "beam") sat in his 18' wide living room and sighed. "Isn't this beam heavenly?"

So Mark and Doug hatched a plan, and Dominic's party suddenly sailed beyond the ordinary; Venture On put down its anchor, tossed out its bumpers, and Mazurka saddled on up beside her and "rafted on."

(The view of our little boat from atop Venture On.)

Our whole party jumped ship for the more exciting of the two boats.

Beside the heft of Venture On, Mazurka bounced like a plastic toy duck. While our party disappeared, Doug's son and daughter politely boarded our tiny vessel - maybe they felt sorry for our little boat? - and we chatted it up. Before long, our party returned, and we took in our lines...almost leaving behind one crewmember who jumped onboard just in time.

Were the fireworks better that night? Quite possibly.



Thanks to Dominic Chan for winning the auction.Thanks to Alisa Kusolvisitkul for taking awesome photos. And thanks to Captain Doug James and his crew for letting us raft on!

The Live Aboard Backyard

On May 1st we cruised to Belmont Harbor for the summer, leaving a South Loop backyard that looks like this:


For a northside backyard that looks like this:


This season we're on G-Dock, which puts us smack in the middle of the harbor, away from Lake Shore Drive and the bike path and fishermen who jump the fence to snag salmon beside our kitchen window. Now when we get up in the morning, we can watch the sunrise over the lake, and the only fishermen we see look like this:


But when you live in Lincoln Park, you never know what you'll find in your backyard. Like tonight, when I looked up from my dinner to see this:


Yes, that is a photo shoot of a naked lady.


Maybe our car, aka "the landboat," will make a guest appearance in the October issue of Playboy?

Creative Editors at Work

Besides traveling far and wide and writing about it for the Chicago Sun-Times, I've been working on a book about our newlywed life on Mazurka, and publicizing the live aboard life.

Some very creative editors have come up with some stellar headlines:

Trawler Scrawler in the River Cities Reader.
-and-
Hull House in Lake Magazine.

Cheney Update 2008

March was a busy month for us live aboards - mainly because we were everywhere but living aboard Mazurka. Two weekends in Iowa...then California, Texas, and Duluth, Minnesota. The captain's in Arizona right now, leaving me to defend our homestead against wild animals.

In between our trips, we would venture back to Mazurka, leery of what the Cheneys might have been up to. For the last two years, they have nested by the second week of March and commenced their full-force attack on anyone who dared venture within twenty feet of their eggs.

Just before D-Day, Mark built the contraption to end all nest-building:
It seemed to do the trick. The Cheneys would wander around aimlessly, unable to get under the chicken wire. We thought the problem was solved and they would find a new place to build their nest - somewhere far, far away. Until one night I came home and found this:
That's right; in the narrow strip of free land between concrete and chicken wire, Mrs. Cheney built her nest. And laid an egg in it. But on the night I traipsed by, she and her husband were nowhere to be found.

This did not bode well for us, as the new nest was now even closer than nests of previous years. So we got out the umbrellas and succumbed to another spring of relentless attacks.

Except Mr. Cheney had disappeared. Mrs. Cheney would hiss and fuss when we passed by, but she seemed to be on her own, except for a few younger-looking geese, second-rate stand-ins for the pater familias.

We wondered if something had happened to the old fella. Mark and I would approach with our umbrellas hoisted, ready to defend, but when the stand-ins merely waddled by, we would sigh, "Nope, not Cheney." We theorized that perhaps he thought one measely egg wasn't worth guarding, that he had abandoned his wife.

And then four more eggs appeared in the nest, and Cheney returned in rare form, wrecking umbrellas and attacking us and our guests with his usual gusto. Our brother-in-law Ken, surviving an attack while protecting his own small children, observed the slingshots, whips, and umbrellas decorating our saloon and said, "You know it's goose season when you're surrounded by protection."

But the ultimate protection was yet to come...when one of our neighbors called to say he had a BB gun we could borrow. Mark practiced on some new geese who nested just north of our bow - aiming carefully at the tail end, just enough to make them uncomfortable without causing any real harm. Just a few times is enough to train any Pavlovian creature.

So now Cheney guards his wife and his new nest, and when we walk by, he reluctantly lets us pass with hardly a sneer.

I still raise my umbrella, just in case.

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.