Photo by Bea Bosco

Our third day of load-in saw much of the physical production come together. Today was about lowering all of the assembled pieces with a crane into the water off of our staging area southwest of the base of the Pier. Throughout the day we generated an incredible amount of interest from tourists on board the water taxis as they cruised slowly by us—a car (complete with caravan trailer), a 12–foot-tall bed with oars, and a 50-foot-long red carpet are not exactly commonplace floating on our waters!

Late in the morning we began towing some of the larger pieces out to the end of the Pier to anchor in the stage area. We took two of our support boats (one to push and one to pull), and began the slow process of towing our tree up the channel. In order to assist us in the placement of the tree, one of the company members remained on the end of the Pier with a rangefinder, which measures the distance to a specific visible point, to ensure that the tree was anchored at the appropriate place on the water. I can only imagine the conversations about the crazy people in a boat trying to plant trees and light posts in the middle of Lake Michigan!

Photo by Chris Plevin

We also began the process of preparing the pyrotechnics. Challenges with the language barriers, converting French into English and back again, are surfacing—very small differences stemming from metric to imperial conversion alone can have a substantial impact when discussing the size and fit of pyro devices. Thursday will be a big push in order to keep on schedule with this very substantial process of loading and wiring the explosives.

Photo by Bea Bosco

The end of the day brought a fast-moving and powerful storm, which required us to scramble to get our lighting rig up and functioning. We had planned to install lights on the marker buoys at the end of the day in order to ensure that boat traffic was aware of the perimeter around our stage and of the set pieces anchored within. The quickly developing hazards of lightning and rough water conditions required us to stop before our work was complete. Instead, we resorted to getting our stage lights operational to keep boaters safe by lighting up the obstacles through the driving rain. It was a soggy process to be sure, but a necessity given the heavy marine traffic off the end of the Pier. The weather Thursday is looking to be equally uncooperative and will no doubt pose challenges to keeping on schedule with our further scenic, pyro and sound install preparation.