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< Jan/Feb 2002
	Hotline
Paddlers Win Right to Chicago Waterways

A few years back, a television commercial ran showing a kayak-topped SUV parked in a downtown financial district, with a young businessman walking by wishing he could be the man in the driver’s seat. This has been the sentiment for many Chicago area kayakers who’ve had to travel great distances to find places to paddle. But thanks to a few local enthusiasts, the Windy City now has the potential to become a popular kayaking destination.

"Chicago was not paddlecraft friendly," says local kayaker Gary Mechanic. In the mid-’90s there were no legal launch sites in the city. Mechanic and friends were forced to travel out of state or hope a city harbor master turned a blind eye to their launches. Even when they would make it onto Lake Michigan, locks restricted travel on the Chicago river; those in control weren’t crazy about kayakers zipping in and out. These conditions led Mechanic to host a conference in 1996, bringing together paddling advocates and city and county officials to study the problem. "Even the mayor got involved," Mechanic says.

The result was an independent study investigating 300 sites—approving 174 for launches. The potential was a water trail (when interconnected) of nearly 500 miles for Chicago’s paddlers. Results in hand, the Chicago Park District held a trial kayak season in 1999. Beaches (on the lake) and ramps (on the river) were created to test logistics, congestion and disruption to commercial vessels. "The locations were based on existing geography and conditions," says the Park District’s Bob Foster. "We weren’t going to put a launch site in a spot like North Avenue Beach. It would be too disruptive."

In the end, 10 spots on the lake (and a handful on the Chicago River) were approved and opened for paddlers, many of whom took to them for the first time this past summer. Mechanic and friends knew they had been victorious when the official Chicago trail map, which had previously listed only bike routes, was updated to include kayak launch sites. Though Chicago’s kayaking community isn’t huge—Nagel estimates 1,000 Chicagoans call themselves kayakers, 250 belonging to the Chicago Area Sea Kayaking Association and 200 to the Lincoln Park Boat Club—the launch sites were created to lure outsiders as well. "The Park District had been getting calls from out of towners not knowing if there were places to launch," Foster adds. "People at the beaches had been asking the lifeguards if they could launch."

And for that depressed Chicago businessman? He no longer has to look enviously at the kayak strapped to the SUV, heading out of town in search of a launch site. Thanks to some politically minded paddlers, he can simply walk down to the beach and put in. "Kayaking is definitely a virgin sport in Chicago," Nagel says. "But it has the appeal of one of the high-risk activities that people want to get involved in. Chicago has no mountains and no woods, so you have to do it on the water."

—Chris McNamara