The next time you’re out for a lazy boat ride on the Chain o’ Lakes, think about the following cautionary tale. Its main character just might be piloting the boat next to you.
On a nice summer day a few years ago, Lake County Sheriff’s Department Marine Unit deputies spotted a man, a hefty 250-pounder, piloting a boat erratically under the Chain’s “Beer Can Bridge.” The U.S. Highway 12 bridge has earned that name for the empties that fellow drunkards like to leave propped on its underside.
The officers stopped the boat in Nippersink Lake, whereupon the man (let’s call him “Bubba”) ignored officers’ admonitions to remain in the boat and instead walked directly off the end of it as if walking the plan
“So now we had him floundering around in the water,” remembers Sgt. Jim Bryant of the Marine Safety Unit. “And our officers had to take off their gun belts and jump in after him.”
Finally they pulled “Bubba” out and forcibly took him to their headquarters, whereupon he broke away and ran, taking a dive off the retaining wall into the water. Unfortunately for “Bubba,” the water was very shallow, with a very muddy bottm.
“And he kind of stuck there, like a … stick,” Bryant remembers of the man, who was, surprisingly, uninjured in the debacle. “Drunk as a hoot owl too. I thought it was simply hilarious, watching the guy wave his legs in the air.
“Those (deputies) wanted to leave him there so bad,” Bryant says. Then he turns serious. “But they recognized their responsibility, and, risking life and limb, pulled him out of the water again.”
Some 37 boaters were arrested last year on the Chain for operating under the influence, and 12 so far this summer. But drunken boaters are just one of the many problems that plague the Chain o’ Lakes and Fox River area, a tourist spot in Lake and McHenry Counties that draws more than 1.5 million visitors annually.
The problems brought on by the Chain’s longtime popularity are legion. The lakes become shallower and shallower each year, as silt builds up from overuse. The lotus flowers that once brought hordes of tourists to the area in the 1930s and 1940s can now be glimpsed only in remote bays. And this year, a record 22,564 boats are registered to operate on the Chain. That means increasing numbers of weekend warriors choking its channels, violating proper boating etiquette and driving patterns, anchoring at sandbars to spend the day in the sun and throwing their debris (empty pop cans, dirty diapers) into the water.
It’s a vicious circle. Business owners and civic leaders revel in the ever-increasing tourist dollars, while residents and others bemoan the increased overcrowding. Yet most love the lakeside lifestyle too much to leave.
On weekends, it’s the psychic equivalent of trying to get a little peace and quiet in your yard alongside Interstate Highway 94 at rush hour.
“We do not go out on the Chain on the weekends,” explains Carol Jonites, treasurer of the Felter’s Homeowners’ Association on Lake Catherine, a quiet community of 160 homes in unincorporated Antioch Township. Traffic jams, honking horns and hot, obnoxious tourists keep her from traveling in her car as well. “We don’t even go to the Jewel,” she says.
But moving to their Chain summer home in 1985 after her husband’s retirement was the fulfillment of a lifetime dream. “So we’ll holler about it,” she says, “but we’ll never leave.”
While the Lake County Sheriff’s Department Marine Safety Unit has been on the Chain since the early 1960s, members have stepped up patrolling efforts in recent years. The unit has a staff of three full-time and 42 seasonal employees and five watercraft on the Chain. (Additionally, McHenry County Sheriff’s Department deputies patrol the Fox River, and boats from both the Department of Conservation and the U.S. Coast Guard police the Chain.)
On a recent sunny holiday weekend, officers Joe Bonadonna, a Lake Marie resident and retired Chicago police officer, and Sam Martinez, a Chicago police officer, toured the Chain in their two-man boat, stopping boaters for security and safety checks while watching for drunken boat operators and others.
“Some of them are hot-rodders,” Martinez explains. “They’ll cross your bow maybe a few feet in front of you.”
But he is quick to add: “Ninety percent of the people out here are law-abiding citizens.”
Pausing in Grass Lake for a safety check on a pleasure boat packed with a large, sunburned family, Martinez and Bonadonna ask the man driving the boat to toot its horn and pull out its life preservers and the fire extinguisher.
“You have a good day now,” Martinez says, sending the family on its way. “We’re not here to be the Gestapo. We just want everyone to have a safe time.”
The sheriff’s department patrols are welcomed by most boaters and residents of the Chain, even diehard party guys like Blarney Island regular Larry Nalezny. Nalezny is a 34-year-old real estate agent and property manager and self-proclaimed “mayor,” of Blarney Island, the hot-spot bar in Grass Lake.
“I welcome them,” Nalezny says. He thinks the deputies help defuse problems caused by “weekend warriors,” what he calls boaters unfamiliar with the Chain’s driving patterns. “It gets pretty scary sometimes.”
“They’re doing what they can,” says Lake Catherine’s Jonites, with a sigh.
With a 1993 budget of $176,395, however, Bryant feels that the Marine Unit needs increased financial support from the county “if we’re going to make an impact out here.”
Patrolling the Chain, one of the busiest inland waterways in the country, is a tough job. On any given weekend, an estimated 1,500 boats can be out on the lakes at one time, 2,000 on well-trafficked holiday weekends.
“On a warm weekend, you can literally walk across a channel from boat to boat,” Bryant says.
Business owner John Haley loves it. Since 1972 his family has owned Blarney Island, along with its adjacent bar on shore, Port of Blarney, where shuttles run out to the island bar.
There, a tropical atmosphere pervades. Bikini contests are de rigueur, not to mention (as Marine Unit officer Sam Martinez so succinctly puts it) the “lingerie sort of festooning the ceiling.”
Blarney Island’s Thursday night boat drag races are a weekly event, attracting some 200 boats mooring at the bar as well as 300 to 400 more that anchor along the race course.
“It’s Babe-o-rama. It’s Babesville,” Nalezny says, describing the bar’s appeal. Nalezny, a part-time Wood Dale resident and part-time resident of Vacation Village condominiums in Fox Lake, even has his own monogrammed bar stool at the bar. “Blarney Island,” he says, “is a nice place to be on a hot day.”
Since Haley’s family has owned Blarney Island, the bar has increased the number of boat slips to 200 from 70 and now attracts 1,000 to 1,500 customers on a busy weekend day.
Despite all this, however, Haley disputes the residents’ claim that increased traffic has caused problems along the Chain.
“If (23,000 registered boaters) are coming to the Chain o’ Lakes, it can’t be all that dangerous,” he says. He says the mandatory 25 m.p.h. night speed limit has helped to slow things down. The speed limit was instituted in 1986, shortly after the worst boating accident in the Chain’s history, a late-night collision in which five boaters were killed.
Few dispute, however, that the overcrowding has wreaked havoc on the Chain’s fragile ecosystem. A May Army Corps of Engineers environmental impact study found that the Chain’s continued popularity and appeal to weekend boaters, hikers and campers has “degraded the environment and reduced the aesthetic appeal of the area.” In June, the corps took the controversial step of banning construction of new boat piers or ramps, unless they replace structures already in place.
Pete Jakstas Sr., president of Mineola Marine and Mineola Restaurant in Fox Lake, says he is in favor of increased dredging of silt and other debris from the shallow bottoms of the Chain’s 12 lakes. Last year, for example, the Chain o’ Lakes Fox River Waterway Management Agency removed 65,000 dump truckloads of silt from the area.
But Jakstas questions the accuracy of the statistics used in the study, which tracks a large increase in boating permits, to 22,564 today from 16,654 in 1987.
During the first years of record-keeping, he says, user-permit laws were not rigidly enforced. In his estimation, only 50 percent of boaters complied with the regulation. Over the years, increased enforcement has inflated numbers of registered boaters.
“The number of boats has stayed the same,” he insists. “In 1987, (the marina) was filled to capacity, with a waiting list. I am not filled to capacity now.”
“I’ve heard that comment,” says Karen C. Kabbes, executive director of the Chain o’ Lakes Fox River Waterway Management Agency. “Certainly, the compliance with user-fee requirements is much greater now.”
From his standpoint, Jakstas feels the Chain has “declined” in dramatic fashion over the last 20 years, from its heyday as a resort and recreation area in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, the boat traffic is slowing along Lake Catherine, and the late afternoon sunlight is sparkling off the water. A group from the neighborhood association, Felter’s Association on Lake Catherine, gathers at a picnic table on their 600-foot private beach to talk about life on the Chain o’ Lakes.
A few yards away, children from the neighborhood float dolphin rafts in the water, off the three-sided pier that residents built especially to prevent boaters and personal watercraft drivers from buzzing the shoreline and endangering swimmers.
“Things have changed a lot since the old days,” says tool salesman Mark Fournier, 47, of Lake Marie. A Chain o’ Lakes resident since birth, Fournier says that, during his childhood, his parents’ neighborhood association had two or three full-time residents. Now all 85 live on the Chain year-round.
These residents, some of the 132,000 who call the Chain o’ Lakes home, feel that one solution to the problem of busy waterways would be a 150-foot “no-wake” area throughout the Chain extending out from shore. This would mean that boats must stay at a slow speed to avoid creating wakes around the shoreline. Currently, no-wake areas are mostly posted in channels and under bridges.
The residents’ quest for an all-shoreline no-wake area gained an important victory July 21, when the Waterway Management Agency board voted to draw up an ordinance establishing the 150-foot no-wake area to be put in place by next boating season. The board will vote on the ordinance Thursday, and it is expected to pass, according to Kabbes.
“At this point, I’d expect they’d vote to adopt the ordinance,” Kabbes said.
Many residents also wish that the number of boaters using the public boat launch in Chain o’ Lake State Park could be limited. Boaters begin lining up at 4:30 a.m. some holiday and weekend mornings, further snarling traffic.
Joining the group is Channel Lake resident and environmental engineer Bill Liniewicz, president of the Woodcrest subdivision neighborhood association. He believes the chances of getting a 150-foot no-wake area are slim to none.
“We’ll never get a 150-foot no wake,” he says, dismissively, adding that he recently added up the pros and cons of living on the Chain, and the cons won by a landslide. Nevertheless, he has no plans to leave.
In contrast, most of the half-dozen or so gathered think the positives outrank the negatives.
“Isn’t it beautiful? After all our complaints?” Carol Jonites says, gesturing to the water. “Last Saturday night we had the most beautiful sunset-all blue, yellow and orange. Vivid colors. I walked over to some of our friends sitting at a picnic table and said, `Look at that. That’s why we live here, to appreciate something like that.”‘
