The NEW plan

At Chicago, we will enter the Calumet Sanitary Bypass which connects Lake Michigan with the Illinois River. The Illinois will lead us to the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis. As the backbone waterway of America, it will be exciting to transverse a portion of the Mighty Mississippi. At Cairo, Illinois we will leave the Mississippi and enter the Ohio River for a short run north and east. We will divert into the Cumberland River at Smithfield, Kentucky which eventually connects us with Kentucky Lake.
From there we enter into the Tenn-Tom Waterway which is an interconnected series of Rivers: the Tennessee, a connecting canal to the Tombigbee Creek which becomes the Tombigbee River, the Lower Black Warrior River, and lastly the Mobile River to Mobile AL.
This will bring us into the Golf of Mexico to YANKEETOWN, FL.

August 30th, our first attempt to leave Chicago

We left as planned on August 30th, 2005 the weather was good and our first day's plan was just to motor over to the Michigan shoreline, stay the night at anchor and sail up the Michigan side of the lake given the prevailing wind direction. At about 3pm we began to lose engine power so we decided to head straight to shore in good light and fix the problem next day. Well, lots of things happened, we both were very seasick and the boat was taking water over the stern and beginning to flood below. After six hours or so, we got the water out (with some help from the Coast Guard and our Guardian Angels) and we are back in Chicago do get the boat back to it's original beauty.

We are a little disappointed that we can not make the trip up the St. Lawrence Seaway because winter is just around the corner. But there are always new plans and new adventures just around the corner, too ...