Day 270
The free dock at Waterford, NY is just below Lock 2, the actual beginning of the Erie Canal. We walked up to the lock house and bought our passes for our transit and talked to the lockmaster for a while. When I asked him where to find a liquor store to reprovision he told me to hop in his truck and he would take me, which he did after getting someone to tend the lock while he was gone. Nice guy!
Here you can see a private boat exiting the lock in front of a canal boat. This canal boat was tied up at Waterford and took school children on excursions on the canal.
Here you can see how sailboats carry their masts while transiting the Erie Canal. The people on this boat called "Veritas" waved at us as they went by and shouted that they had been our neighbors in Hampton, VA. It turns out that they were docked across from us last summer at the marina where we kept our boat while getting ready for this trip. Small world!
We entered Lock 2 with four other boats to begin our transit of the Erie Canal. The locks here are called a flight. The first five locks follow one after another with virtually no space between them. We went directly from one lock to the next. The flight of five locks raised us a total of 136 feet from Waterford to the level of the Mohawk River. The canal follows the bed of the Mohawk River for the next hundred miles or so.
Exiting the Waterford Flight into the Mohawk River.
We decided to make our first day in the canal a short one, so after one more lock ,we stopped at the Schenectady Yacht Club for the night. The people here were very nice and offered to drive to the nearby NAPA store to pick up some engine oil I needed. They also had a happy hour "docktail" party on their deck for visiting boaters and club members. A couple from New Zealand, Ken and Lindy on "Rascal" who we had met at Waterford, also stopped here for the night so we got to compare notes and talk some more about the upcoming canal sections and weather predictions.
No comments :
Post a Comment