Steve and Liz's Great Loop Adventure: Erie Canal Part 1

Every town we've visited on the east coast has its claim to fame as far as being the first, best, biggest, most, or oldest in some historical fact or figure. Waterford, NY, at the east end of the Erie Canal is no exception.

Erie Canal cruisers certainly would rate it as "most hospitable". We woke to the local farmers market setting up right on the pier, so we could step out of our boats and buy fresh local produce and bakery. It was still cloudy, but didn't rain that day.

We went up to the first Erie Canal lock to purchase our 10 day lock pass ($37.50). There is a noticeably relaxed atmosphere at these locks compared to the Mississippi Locks. We wanted to get to the other side so we just walked our bikes over the walkway on top of the gate.

The Erie Canal has a long history and is the most well known of the New York Canals. The first Erie was finished in 1825 and the barges were pulled through the water with mules or horses. The route has been changed, the dimensions increased, and the locks rebuilt twice since then. Many of the old towpaths have been made into hiking/biking paths and the old Champlain towpath is accessible from Waterford. The trees hanging out over the still waters of the old canal create a picture perfect bike path.

There were 6 Looper boats along with several other cruisers on the dock, so we had a Social Hour up on the patio of the Welcome Center. We hadn't been to a Looper/Cruiser gathering this large for quite a while. We made plans with 3 other boats to leave together the next morning.

The first five locks of the Erie are called the "flight of five", where the total lift is 169 feet over just a mile and a half of distance. In these five, I secured the boat by passing a midship line around a thick plastic coated cable, held the boat into the wall and scooted the line up the cable as the water quickly rose 30 feet.

The locks are about one fourth the size of the Mississippi Locks as you can see in this picture of Jolie Blond entering the lock.

The remarkable thing about these first five is how close together they are ... the lockmasters have the door already open for us at the next lock as we exit this one.

This sign shows that the last lock was less than a quarter mile back and the next one only .16 miles away. The locks are operated by the State of NY rather than the Army Corps and they are very efficient and friendly toward cruisers. Still, you can't make the kind of mileage in a day that we were used to on the ICW and we traveled just over 20 miles in 5 hours, transiting 7 locks our first day.

At many of the locks, you are allowed to tie for the night on the walls adjacent to the locks. We stayed at Lock 8 and all shared a great dinner on Mas Bueno, with hosts Hal and Cheryl. Here's the wall as we left this morning.

The section of the canal that we are on follows the natural path of the Mohawk River. The sun came out today and it was beautiful, easy cruising. We again locked through 7 locks, each 5-10 miles apart. Some of the locks have been recently refinished and don't have the pipe or the cable to secure the boat, but have heavy ropes hanging down to grab for bow and stern. Kind of like our Mississippi locks except they don't pull the ropes up after each lockage, but let them hang constantly in the water, so they are really dirty. I'm wearing gloves to lock through, first time ever.