We left the dock at Fairport about 8:30 am with sunny skies, and the temperature was already in the low 70s. Our trip was only 32.3 miles, but it included 2 locks with a lift of 25 feet each as well as 64 bridges. The prize for the most unusual bridge of the day goes to the very first bridge at the west end of the Fairport town dock. In August the town is having a celebration in honor of the 100th Birthday of the Main Street Bridge (see picture at right). When this bridge was built, the town had already grown up very close to the old bridge. The new bridge had to be 8 feet lower on the north (right in the picture) end. Also the bridge crosses the canal at an angle.
The other unique thing is that the bridge goes straight up 9 feet everywhere. The geometry of all of this was complex enough that no two pieces of the bridge are the same. Thus, it must have been a nightmare to fabricate the pieces and then assemble the jigsaw puzzle. The picture at the left shows the bridge in the up position, and yes, it is still tilted to the right. The lift was more than enough for Lucky Us to safely pass under.
The second of the two locks this morning had what appeared to be a very unusual outlet. Generally there is a rush of swirling water on the downstream side when the water is let out of a lock. At this lock there was more like a fountain of water squirting water several feet up into the air. Fortunately, it was well outside of the channel into the lock, and we were well away from the turbulence.
Most of today's trip was along the south side of Rochester, NY, and as the bridge count for today illustrates, the area is fairly heavily populated. As such the Canal Pathway, which is a walk, jog bike path along the canal was very busy even for a Monday. At one point I looked ahead and thought that I could see what looked like the mounted police. Sure enough, as we got closer we could see an officer on a horse patrolling the pathway.
The Genesee River crosses the canal and goes right through downtown Rochester before it empties into Lake Ontario. The Genesee has a large drainage basin and as such, it is subject to flooding. Since the water level in the canal is relatively constant, the flood waters would also flow out into the canal on either side and deposit lots of silt. They solved this problem by adding flood gates on either side of the river that can be lowered during floods to keep the river flowing only in its own channel. This does not entirely solve the problem since the canal would be closed to traffic when the gates are down. They solved this problem by putting two flood gates on each side. During normal water levels, both gates are up and you just pass through. During flooding of the Genesee, they used the two flood gates as a lock to lift you up to the level of the Genesee and then back down on the other side. In the picture the boat ahead of us has just passed through the second gate, and we are about to pass through the first gate.
BIG NEWS! Well, at least I think it is big news that we were finally able to put the bimini top up on the flybridge. We did this right after passing the pair of lift (flood) gates on the west side of the Genesee River. According to all of the bridge information that we have for the canal, we should be able to clear the remaining fixed bridges without having to lower the bimini again.
Near the Genesee River we also went under these three beautiful, arched pedestrian bridges. It was quite a sight in a location where the banks of the canal are heavily forested. They actually do provide pedestrian access to a large park on the east side of the Genesee.
Downtown Brockport is nicely restored, and it seems more like a normal old fashioned downtown without a lot of tourist type stores. The buildings are interesting from an architecture stand point and have been nicely maintained.
There are self guided walking tours of the architecture, and there is even a tour of the many different local trees. This is definitely a town that is trying to attract visitors!
The town wall (dock) has plenty of room and power pedestals for boats. There is also a very large new welcome/visitors center with bathrooms and washing machines, etc. There is also this large piece of art (?) in the little waterfront park. It does have a nautical theme of sorts, and at least someone thinks it might be stolen because it is bolted in place... By now you might have gathered that they do not have to worry about me stealing this.
As for the future, we are going to look at the weather forecast again in the morning, but we tentatively plan to travel in the morning tomorrow. The forecast for tomorrow afternoon is not great with a chance of thunder storms. Normally, we would just stay here for the day, but we are trying to plan a little ahead with the Fourth of July weekend coming up in 4 days. Time will tell...
No comments:
Post a Comment