Raft

My time has been taken up with four friends of mine who are building a raft. Building a raft to travel from Chicago to New Orleans. I've been helping out as my schedule allows, although I took a few days off recently to help out on moving the preassembled parts from the backyard of a Hyde Park apartment to the Croissant Marina on the Little Calumet River. (This marina is a great spot--amazing for the friendliness, the methane purgers on the other side of the river, and the barges passing silently by). The weather gods have not been kind though. The majority of the water on the Little Calumet is effluent, and this weekend Chicago received the highest one-day precipitation event ever, AND the remnants of Hurricane Ike, in two separate rain events. In the scheme of things, it was so bad they opened all the normally closed locks that keep the Chicago river and canals from flowing into Lake Michigan. So, our previous spot at the marina is now covered in combined sewage and storm output by ten feet. It put a damper on the weekend for a lot of people; a lot of people are flooded out of their basements and apartments. Ryerson Observatory reports almost 11 inches of rain in the past seven days.

While we now have a 16ftx32ft raft, we still need to mount the 35hp motor and construct the cabins and hammock supports for the travelers. Try this link for construction photos. You might be able to see it without a facebook account--I'm just dumping stuff without much editing.