We left the dock at Navy Pier Marine at the "crack" of 8:05 am this morning and headed 42.2 miles back to Oswego, NY. As we rounded Navy Pier and entered Black River Bay, we passed the Commanding Officer's home at the edge of the battlefield. The picture at right shows the back porch and the waterside of the house. The small building is the pump house that pumped water from a depth of 30 feet in the bay. To the right of the pump house was the site of the outhouse. The outhouse actually had a flush toilet that was primed by water from a tank in the attic. The effluent was piped out to the cliff at the waters edge. Thus, the sewage outlet and the water inlet were only a few feet apart. In today's world, that close proximity would be considered unsafe at best...
A short distance later we passed the site of the battlefield. The picture at left shows the battlefield with a steep cliff at the waterside. The earthen works and several small forts with cannons would have made any landing from the waterside impractical.
The attacking British and Canadian forces landed safely several miles to the west. The picture at the right is looking south with Horse Island on the right and the mainland with the battlefield to the left. The enemy landed on the west side of Horse Island (out of view to the right of the picture). They crossed the island and forded to the mainland along a shallow sand bar between the island and the mainland. They then proceeded east (left) through thick forest for a about a mile until they reached the clearing where the defenders were entrenched. Later the retreating enemy would have to repeat the fording and cross Horse Island to rowboats waiting to take them to the warships. Their casualties amounted to about 30% dead and wounded who were left behind in the hasty retreat. Walking around the battlefield and then passing the entire scene on Lucky Us really helped to put the whole battle in perspective.
About 8 miles west of Sackets Harbor, we passed the Stoney Point Lighthouse on the mainland and actually entered Lake Ontario. There were still at least two good sized islands, but otherwise, we were in open water for the remaining 34 miles to Oswego, NY. As you can see in the picture above, the wind was so light that there were only small ripples on the water. Believe it or not, there was no wind out in the Lake Ontario. Hence the reference to cruising on a mill pond in today's title.
When we approached Oswego, there was a light onshore breeze starting about 3 miles out from shore. In the picture at the left you can see the glassy water with the start of ripples from the onshore breeze in the distance. The large cooling tower on land is part of the Nine Mile Point (nuclear) Power Station. So, at this point we are a little over an hour away from Oswego.
As we entered the out harbor at Oswego, there was a crane on a barge that was dredging the channel with a bucket and dumping the sediment in barges to be dumped just off shore in a deep part of the lake. This ended the smoothest open water crossing that I have ever been on. We then proceeded to the Oswego Marina where we had stayed almost three weeks ago when we first arrived in Oswego via the Oswego Canal from the south.
We plan to spend two nights here in Oswego before heading to Lake Erie at Buffalo, NY via the Erie Canal. Between the start of the Erie Canal at the Hudson River and Oswego, all of the bridges were high enough for us to pass safely underneath. On the way to Buffalo we will pass under quite a few bridges with vertical clearances of as little as 15 feet. With the radar mast up we have a clearance of about 18.5 feet. I say "about" because the weight of the boat is dependent on how full our water and fuel tanks are. We carry about 300 gallons of fresh water and 600 gallons of diesel fuel, which when full would weigh about 7,000 pounds. Its pretty simple. The more the boat weighs, the deeper we float, which reduces vertical clearance but at the same time it increases the draft (depth of the hull). One of the things that we will be doing tomorrow is practicing lowering the radar mast to get our height down to about 16 feet. We will also be removing the sides of the flybridge enclosure so that we can lower the bimini top to get under 15 feet of vertical clearance when necessary.
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