Because of Salty's height (18.5 ft with radar post down), we were unable to go down the Chicago River to the Illinois River because of a 17-foot railroad bridge downtown. However, we are able to go down the Calumet River with its height limitation of 19 feet, 6 inches (another railroad bridge). The entry to the Calumet River is 13 miles south of the Chicago River, just at the Indiana border. We made our way south and fueled up in Hammond, Indiana at the friendly marina there and crossed back to Illinois for the 2 mile trek to the entry of the Calumet River.

We steeled ourselves for this part of the trip. Reading all of the blog and forum postings of those going before us, we were expecting plenty of grouchy commercial traffic - tugs and barges with not much patience for "plastic boats" or PCs as they call us (pleasure craft). While we did run into some cranky tug, bridge and lock operators, for the most part we were able to manage the 50 or so bridges and narrow canals in the most industrial place that Salty has ever been in. For all the refineries, factories, scrap metal yards, chemical and natural gas loading docks, the river is pretty clean and free of debris. There is a tremendous amount of traffic but most of the commercial vessel operators did speak to us via VHF radio and told us where to go to keep out of the way of barge traffic in what seemed a very intimidating and formidable passage.

In the first part of the Calumet River, we were conscious of Salty's height as bridges that were labeled as providing 25 feet or more clearance seemed awfully close to her top. When we passed under the Torrance Avenue bridge - allegedly providing 22 feet of clearance, we passed under with barely a foot to spare. How could we have gotten our boat height so wrong? What would happen when we reached the true bottleneck height of 19 feet? The answer became clear a further few miles down the river when we arrived at the O'Brien Lock - which usually provides a foot or less drop and is held wide open for passage. This day we actually had to lock through for a 4.5 foot drop - the Calumet was at least 3.5 feet higher than normal pool so that explained the close call.

After this point, joining the ship and sanitary canal - after about 30 miles, we passed the 19-foot fixed RR bridge without event discovering we had some 52 inches to spare - the water being lower than expected on this stretch. Shortly after that, we passed through the electric fish barrier. They tell you to shut off all boat electronics in case they're for some reason not grounded - so that they don't short-circuit or blow out - and to keep your body parts out of the water (!). The electric fish barrier - a half mile of electrically-charged water - is supposed to keep invasive species such as Asian carp from reaching the great lakes. The Asian carp in the rivers get very agitated at the frequencies of some boat motors and often jump onto boat decks and docks, and flop about, creating a slimy bloody mess. We didn't experience any of that directly, but plenty of other boaters we heard of did and we did see a lot of the carp jumping high out of the water.

After a long slog of a day, we approached Joliet, only to find that we had just missed the bridge curfew (rush hour) by minutes and had to wait an hour for the bridges to let us pass. We headed for the free wall at Bicentennial Park in Joliet just prior to sundown - tied up and connected to the free power source (!). We were too tired to explore Joliet and the casino across the street - and we had to get up at dawn to make tracks and pass three locks and 73 miles to our next stop. As we settled down and made soup for dinner in the Instant Pot, masses of uprooted water grasses passed by the boat in the several mile per hour current. Some mats of grass were so thick that plastic bottles and other trash rested on top of them. We had heard that this kind of debris could clog the sea strainers for the water cooling on the engine - so we had to be ready in the morning darkness when we left to manage that issue. The parking lot in the park right by the boat wall had about 6 police cars parked there all night - hopefully to deter any mischief by the locals - historically there had been problems with visitors in the night hopping on boats, but we had no problem at all and went to sleep early so as to catch the first light next day.