Lots of Locks...

First, I screwed up yesterday and forgot to turn on the SPOT to update our position.  Sorry.  We spent the night in Amsterdam, NY.

Some of the steamboats in Waterford.

Yesterday morning around 8:30 we left Waterford, New York and entered the Erie Canal.  We locked through "The Flight of Five" with one other power boat.  The Flight is 5 locks in 1.5 miles with the highest lift - 150 feet - over the shortest distance of any canal in the world.   Once through the Flight the power boat motored on ahead and we had the next 5 locks all to ourselves.  Amsterdam didn't have much to offer.  We tried to watch "The Da Vinci Code" but I kept falling asleep so we called it a night.

This morning there were three other foreign boats at the first lock we came to - one from Kiel, Germany, one from Toronto, and one from Alabama.  We were all going at about the same speed so we ended up locking through the first four or five locks we came to together.  One boat (Toronto) was slightly faster so they always got to the lock first.  The lock master knew there were three other boats coming so Toronto always had to wait.  Eventually Toronto got far enough ahead in one of the longer stretches so they were able to lock through on their own.  But by then we had picked up another boat so we still had three other lock mates.  Then that boat pulled off for an early stop and the first power boat who we had started with yesterday showed up again.  At the last lock before we stopped for the night we were still traveling with one boat from first thing this morning and the single boat that we had locked with yesterday.

This morning we started in fog.  It was clear behind us on the water so we thought it would soon burn off up ahead.  Instead it got denser as we moved west, until we ended up with about quarter mile visibility.  Made it pretty interesting finding the navigation marks up ahead.  Once we made it through the first lock it was clear the rest of the day.

This doesn't really do the fog justice.

Most of the mechanism and electric motors that operate the locks are from the early 1900s.  Today we locked through one lock with a lift of 40.5 feet, which is one of the highest single lifts in the world.  There is virtually no commercial traffic on the canal these days.  Here in the Mohawk River Valley there is a rail line on one side that has a constant stream of freight trains.  The other side has the New York Thruway (Highway 90) which is a semi corridor.



All hands on deck for the 40 foot lock.




The lower section (below the white) slides down while the counter-weight goes up.



Detail of the counter-weight.  Looks like their initial weight calculations were
a bit off - see the additional weights cabled on top.

Tonight we are in Herkimer, NY which was the setting for Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy".  It's a pretty good book, made even better because it's based on a true story.  (Boy meets girl, boy meets another prettier, richer girl, boy murders first girl...)   For you non-readers you can check out "A Place in the Sun" staring Montgomery Clift, Liz Taylor, and Shelley Winters.  Not as good as the book, but quicker to get through.