Erie Canal

We've been busy since my last post. From Kingston we went up to Catskill, NY for two nights, then on to the Albany Yacht Club for the weekend. We had to stop in Albany because Waterford, NY, the gateway to the Erie Canal, was closed for the weekend. They were hosting an antique tug festival. We actually saw the best part of the festival from our dock in Albany. The tugs met up Friday afternoon in the Albany harbor and then paraded up the Hudson to Waterford, right past our marina.

We hit the farmer's market in Troy, NY during our Albany weekend. I never realized how much farming is done in the Hudson Valley. The farmer's market was wonderful, we were able to load up on heirloom tomatoes and I treated myself to some of the first apples of the season, along with fabulous raspberries and blackberries. Too bad we can't store much fresh stuff aboard.

After the tug festival ended we moved to Waterford. Waterford is the eastern entrance to the Erie Canal. The first five locks in the canal follow one after the other, you have to do them all in a single day, you are not allowed to stop between them. It actually only takes about two hours to do them all, the lock tenders have this process down. This set of locks, called the Waterford Flight, lift your boat 150 feet. To get some perspective on that, the Panama Canal only lifts boats a total of 85 feet. The picture is of another boat coming out of lock 2. This boat is bigger than Down Time so you can judge the size of the lock. Lock 2 raises your boat about 35 feet. In the 17 locks we have been through so far, the lift has varied from 8 to 40 feet. In total, we are now 363 feet above the Hudson River. At our highest point we will be 420 feet above the Hudson.

To "lock through" you pull up to the outside of a lock and call the lock tender. If the lock is open in your direction, he gives you permission to enter. If not, he tells you about how long you will have to wait for the lock to open. If the lock is not open it is usually because there is a boat coming the other way. Once you enter the lock you look for cables, pipes or ropes down the side of the lock. With the cables and pipes, you wrap a line around the cable/pipe and tie it to your boat. With the ropes you pick one up and tie it to the boat. I do this part while Jim steers the boat close enough to me to lean over and do it, but not so close that the boat hits the concrete side of the lock. Then Jim puts the boat in neutral and goes to the back of the boat to grab one of the lines hanging down. Once the boat is secure, the lock tender closes the gates and begins to fill (or empty) the lock. We hold on to the lines to keep the boat from moving around in the turbulence caused by the incoming (or outgoing) water. Once the lock is filled or emptied completely, then the lock tender opens the other end and you motor out.

Most of the locks have places on either side where you can tie up and spend the night for free. Many of the little towns along the canal have free or low cost docks you can stay at over night. Most nights we hang out by a lock. Last night we stayed in the town marina in Little Falls and had dinner at a restaurant recommended by our friends Don and Ruth.

In addition to the locks, there are also gates on the canal. The gates are big guillotine structures used to regulate the flow of flood waters in the spring and to drain the canal in the winter. I'll bet you didn't know that the Erie Canal is drained every year, even the part that is actually the Mohawk River.