Friday, February 8, 2008

Milwaukee Water Taxi


Milwaukee has spent millions on improving the “River Walk” along the banks of the Milwaukee River over the past few years. For those of us with sailboats a big change came last season when the walkways made it south of the East St. Paul Bridge. The extension of the river walk was important because sailboats can’t go any further up the river as we can’t get our masts under the bridge. The number of public docks along the Milwaukee River in the area of Water Street increased as did the number of bars and restaurants available from the water.

Even with this good news there were still two major drawbacks:

1. At least one person on the boat had to refrain from partying so that they could run the boat,


and


2. the most obvious trip was from the Summerfest Lagoon up the river, or after dinner down the river to the Summerfest Lagoon to concert at the Marcus Theater. Unfortunately there was no place to dock at Summerfest.

A partial solution to item “2” was the new docks at Lakeshore State Park. However, this did not solve problem “1” above. Also, the number of docks at Lakeshore is very limited.

Enter Aaron Kelly of Inner Harbor Marine. Aaron is bringing water taxi service to the Milwaukee waterfront this summer. Start in the center city – end up at Summerfest – or vice versa. This is clearly an idea whose time has come. We will be posting a link to the schedules, pickup points, fees, etc. as soon as they become available.

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