Day 22 to Ft. Edward, NY

      Today is the day that we have been looking forward to as we resume our Great Loop adventure. The rent car was not due back until Noon, but I was off at 8:30 am hoping to get back to Enterprise not long after they opened at 9:00 am. After a short wait, I was safely back at Schuylerville Yacht Basin about 10:30, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the Admiral had pulled Lucky Us about150 feet down the dock to get a pump out. After doing the daily engine room check, we were off at about 11:15am, but the trip was short lived as I soon discovered that the hydraulic steering was not working. So, we went back to the dock to fill the reservoir with fluid and look for leaks. I am sure that I have mentioned this before, but at idle speed the flow of water past the rudders is so slow that they really do not work. Slow speed maneuvering is done almost exclusively by putting one engine in forward and one in reverse to turn. Slower turns can be done with just one engine in gear. That is just the basics as you can do more than just turn, but I do not want to bore you with a full scale lecture… We put about a pint of hydraulic fluid in the reservoir for the upper helm, which is the highest point in the system. There are three hoses, two helm stations, one hydraulic pump and a single large piston that turns the rudder together. There is also a junction on the hydraulic pump with 9 inlets/outlets, three adjustment screws and four mounting screws. Other than all of that, it is a simple system. I found what appeared to be a slow leak at the junction box so I cleaned up some fluid and carefully placed several paper towels to narrow down the location of the leak.

      After that excitement, we left the dock again at 11:40 am. Given the uncertainty about our departure time, we had only planned a short day anyway so the extra delay was not a problem.  We headed toward Ft. Edward only 13.1 miles upstream. Our first lock was C-5, which was only slightly north of our walks along the old Champlain Canal from the Schuyler Yacht Basin. The photo at right was taken 0.7 miles past Lock C-5 with an excellent view of the dam with a high rate of flow. The lift at Lock C-5 was 19 feet and that put us at a level of 102 feet since we left Waterford at the start of the Champlain Canal. There were only scattered high clouds, and we were already well on our way to today’s high of about 90. Unfortunately, the light breeze was from behind us so it was really getting uncomfortable on the flybridge with essentially no breeze.

       There were several long, narrow islands on today’s route. We came through the channel on the left (photo at left) between the island and the mainland. This is the reason why the Lock C-5 and its dam were 0.7 miles apart. The lock was at the downstream end of an island in the middle, and the dam was at the upstream end of the same island. There was no apparent reason for this offset of the lock and dam, but perhaps they were built at different times (?).

      We had visited Lock C-6 by car the day before (photo at right) as you can see with the Admiral and Lucky standing on the lock wall in the photo. The weather was clear and sunny, which only heightened our desire to get back on the water. We have talked about this, and perhaps one of the reasons that we will know when our (big) boating days are over is that someday we might not get this same feeling…

     Also at Lock C-6 we were treated to an excellent view of an old lock from the original Champlain Canal (photo at right). The scale of the last two photos is different, but hopefully you can get a feel for how much smaller the old lock is than the new one. The lock is only about 10 feet wider than Lucky Us...

      The photo at the right shows another of the ubiquitous canal work boats with the distinctive blue and yellow paint scheme. They are an indication of the amount of work that it takes year around to maintain the canal system. We passed very little boat traffic, especially considering that today was a Saturday. We did pass perhaps 6 small boats fishing in the canal.

      We arrived at Ft. Edward in time to walk into town for a late lunch at a wonderful local restaurant. We both had excellent small steaks with a salad and a (dry) baked potato. We walked about a half mile to get to the restaurant, and from what we saw, the town was not in very good shape. We did pass two nicely restored period homes, and one of these is the 1777 McCrea house (photo at the left). The timing of the construction of this house is interesting since it was probably built during the time of the Battle of Saratoga in September and October of 1777. If you look at the front of the house you can see that the windows on the second floor are less than 2 feet below the windows on the third floor. I have seen this before where the windows on the third floor basically start at the floor. This avoids the necessity for dormers in the roof that would be necessary to raise the windows up to their normal height on the wall.