AquaFennatic Great Loop Blog: St Joseph Harbor MI to Chicago IL

Sep 8^th – It’s a humid and windy day with a high chance of thunderstorms. The winds started blowing hard from the west unexpectedly last night which caused us to rock and roll most of the night on the St Joseph river. Today the waves are higher than we expected and there’s a high risk of thunderstorms thus we’ve decided to delay our 60 mile crossing to Chicago to tomorrow morning. We moved our boat to the West Basin Marine in St Joseph today to eliminate the rocking and rolling. Andrew, the manager of West Basin, is a great guy and drove us to a grocery store to replenish our food, beer and water. The rescue tape worked great on the oil hose with no leaks however we ran into another issue that seems to be related to the Inverter/Charger. The Inverter wasn’t passing through the shore power to our panel. I tested all the components ... shore power outlet OK, Cords OK, Transfer switch OK, Inverter has AC going in but not coming out which supplies the AC panel. As I was testing the Inverter I heard a switch click inside the inverter (I think) and magically everything was working again. Hopefully this was just a glitch and I don’t need to replace the Inverter/Charger. We met Wayne and Alyce from Aurora B as well as Wayne and Lynn from LeryLynn today and had docktails with them. It was Alyce’s birthday today and for a birthday cake she baked one of the best upside down pineapple cakes that I’ve ever tasted!

Sep 9^th – Today was a hot and humid day with low winds and rain towards the end of the day. We got up early and traveled 60 miles from St Joseph to Chicago and encountered a time change along the way since it’s an hour earlier in Chicago. We are staying at DeSable Marina which is right downtown. We walked 16 km today within Chicago and visited Navy Pier, Millennium Park and the Magnificent Mile. We were going to go out for Deep Dish Pizza, however the rain changed our plans plus we were out of gas from all that walking! We had a couple cold beers on the boat plus a stir fry. I expect we’ll do more walking tomorrow and get our deep dish pizza fix. Maria is extremely happy since there are no more Lake Michigan crossings left on the trip ... Exxxcellent! However we seem to be having intermittent Inverter problems. I'm currently just monitoring this issue since I'm hoping not to spend my time in Chicago down in the engine compartment.