Today got confusing… We left Fonda at 9:00
am with our original destination of Schenectedy, NY for a distance of about 30
miles. We got to Schenectady at 2:30 pm in great weather, and we had breezed
through 5 locks with almost no delays. The lock throughs were quick since all
of the locks only had smaller drops of 11 to 15 feet. We only had 24 miles more to go
to reach Waterford at the East end of the Erie Canal. However, there were 6
more locks with a total drop of 196 feet. Feeling confident after our quick
lock throughs so far, we decided to head on to Waterford… I will not make you
wait for the answer, which is that we made excellent time and arrived in
Waterford about 5:00 pm. The 11 locks in one day is a record for Lucky Us, especially
given that we did all of this in only about 8 hours.
It does not seem like it at times, but
the Canal System does remove trees and other debris from the canal. The photo
at the right shows the visual proof in the form of the tug Waterford with her
barge loaded with trees removed from the canal. Talk about a never ending job… The
flowing water and the wakes from boats are continually eroding back the banks
and dropping more trees into the water.
As we were approaching Lock 8, I called the
Lockmaster from about a mile out to request a lock through. He said to hurry
because he was bringing up 3 boats, and he would be closing the lock after he
took us down. We slipped right into the lock as soon as the last boat cleared
the lock. The reason for the closure was that he was going back down to lock
through a commercial shipment of 6 beer vats destined for the Genesee Beer
Brewery in Rochester, NY. We had seen pictures in newspapers and pictures on
TV, but we had missed the first shipment as it passed us during the night. The
photo on the left shows our view as we exited the lock. There was one tug with
2 barges with 3 vats in each barge. According to one newspaper account, the
tanks hold the equivalent of 2,000 barrels, or 27,560 cases or 661,440 twelve
ounce servings. The wording was not clear as to whether the numbers were for
one tank or all 12 together. In any event the numbers are impressive. While we
were in the lock, I noticed a crowd of people gathered on the shore with more
cars arriving to see the big event.
The photo at the right, which I found on
the web, shows a view of the locking process taken from above. As you can see
there is only room for one barge and the tug inside the lock. Thus, the tug
will have to tie off the barge and go back down to retrieve the other to lock
it up. The lock closure was not a huge problem if we had not made it through,
but the delay would have been more than an hour. Almost all of the pleasure
boat traffic on the canal has been in the opposite direction from us. The line
up of boats below the lock was already starting to grow as we left.
The last five locks are very closely
spaced as little as 0.15 miles apart, and they are known as the Waterford
Flight. These five have a total drop of 166 feet down to the level of the
Hudson River at this location. We were so busy going rapidly from one lock to
the next that we did not have time to take any pictures, but it was a fun trip
down. Just before we reached the Waterford Flight we did pass these very
attractive twin bridges (photo at left). Just after these bridges we went
through the last of the guard gates on the canal and almost immediately arrived
at the first lock.
When we arrived at the town of Waterford,
we could not get a dock space on the floating dock with power so we tied up in
front of a tug barge pair on the free wall. We knew that others would be
running their generators so we were prepared to do that. However, we decided to
head into town for dinner after giving Lucky a long awaited trip ashore. The
downtown area consisted of 5 blocks of businesses along Broad street, which was
only three blocks away from the canal. As we reached Broad Street, I noticed a
lot of people standing about as if they were waiting for something. I asked a
lady, and she said that the “Memorial Day Parade” should be here in a few
minutes. We thought that it was a little unusual to have that parade on
Wednesday, May 24, but sure enough the parade started passing by in about 20
minutes. The photo at the right shows the color guard leading the parade. By
this time we had been seated at a local café, but we had a marvelous view out
the window.
As befitting the meaning of Memorial Day,
there were mainly veterans from all wars participating, and the crowd showed
their appreciation. Of course, there were also plenty of fire engines and
little league teams. I just love small town parades, and once again, the Loop
adventure had lead us here at the right time…
The last parade picture (I promise) shows
a really good looking fyfe and drum corps strutting their stuff. Like I said,
what fun!
After dinner we went back to Lucky Us and turned on the generator to charge things and to cool the boat down for the night. There is an exhaust blower in the engine room, but the large diesel engines have a LOT of hot cast iron at the end of a day’s run. So, even though it had cooled down outside the air conditioner helps to offset the heat coming through the floor from the engine room. The photo at the left shows the beautiful sky overhead above Lucky Us as we neared sunset.
Once again, sleep came early after an
exciting day on the water…
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