Stats for June 26, 2019

Origin: Waterford, NY Free Wall

Destination: Whitehall, NY

Distance: 61.2 miles

Speed: 7.2 mph

Time on the Move: 8 hours and 29 minutes

Now that we are back in rivers, our schedule is controlled by locks once again. The good news is that there isn’t much (any?) commercial traffic through here, so we don’t have to worry about long waits, just coordination with other pleasure craft. Also, the locks open at 7 am and close at 5 pm, so traveling within those hours and finding a good place to stop before the locks close is our new challenge. We tend to like to travel until almost dark sometimes, and we don’t really like to be on someone else’s schedule, but we don’t have much choice here!

This was our view in Waterford along the free wall. Several of these boats were starting the Erie today, some were hanging out for another day, one was headed south, and we were the only ones heading north. We pushed Parrot Bay off for their planned 7:00 arrival at Erie #2 and then fired up the diesels for our departure.

So the story with the clearance of bridges is that the posted clearance is 15’4″ for several of the bridges along the Champlain, and the lowest we can get is 16’9″ with our anchor light down. When Mike called the locks the day before, they said the pool (depth of water) was down a bit so actual clearance should be closer to 17′ 6″ to 18′. It was still pretty close for our liking, and nerve wrecking that the printed clearances were well short of what we needed, but several lockmasters agreed that we should be fine.

There were no posted clearance boards like there are in many other places, so that left us to completely trust the documented clearances and our own guesstimates based on what we saw. This first bridge sure looked low, but it wasn’t even the one in question.

Just before 10:00 we neared the LOW bridge (apparently–spoiler alert: many of them seemed this low!!)….and it looked really, really low. The kids and I went on the bow. Grandma took a prime seat right up front. Mike pooped his pants and then held his breath…

Mike put the boat in idle as we approached the bridge so we would just glide underneath (hopefully) OR not hit with much force (if something was miscalculated and we actually hit)….

On the other side….WHEW!! Of course we didn’t hit it!! Plenty of room to spare–Mike guessed 11 inches or so!!

Minutes after that drama we were all tied up in another lock. From one adventure to the next around here!! The report from Grandma on locking is that it is much calmer and easier than she anticipated. However, she did give big credit to the amount of communication needed between captain and crew for the “easier” part. She could definitely relate to any tense parts (ie: the captain yelling from the helm “talk to me! talk to me!” because he can’t judge how close we actually are to the wall, so he needs some numbers from me.).

We pulled up to the wall in Whitehall with a little extra excitement as we were surprised to see our friends on Ceci Kay already docked there. Rain was threatening, but we were ready for dinner, so Mike grilled in the grassy area next to the boat and we had a great meal at a picnic table there. The kids played in the grass, explored, and wrote with sidewalk chalk.

As soon as we got done eating, the skies opened and it started to pour. We opened a bottle of wine that we saved from the marina in Cape May and enjoyed happy hour while we waited for the rain to stop. In the meanwhile, Jan and Stacy from Ceci Kay came back to their boat and paid us a little visit. While we were chatting, the rain stopped and we decided we should get off the boat and explore before it got dark.

We went venturing over the bridge and through town. It was pretty, but the town wasn’t much to write home about. We actually had a run in with some kids who I think were carnies in town visiting (no lie–they almost ran into my mom on their bikes!). Then there was a big brawl across the river from us, which was a bit unsettling and caused us to call the police. On a good note, we had friends nearby, we stopped and bought fresh strawberries from an Amish family in town, and we had ice cream on board. Focusing on the positives, we can’t complain!!

Thanks for reading and following along on our grand adventures!!