Lake Champlain here we come
Friday, June 16 through Saturday, June 17
This tug is waiting for the lock to open at 7 in the morning. The lock behind it is the first lock of the Erie Canal.
Here is the dividing point – Erie Canal one way and the Champlain Canal the other…
We left Waterford at around 9 AM. It was hard to leave Bev and Bruce on SeaQuest, as we have been having a good time with them for the last three weeks. They will be taking the Erie canal and we will be taking the lake Champlain route. This route isn’t taken by very many loopers because most people want to do the loop in one year and this route adds on 5 to 6 weeks to their trip. Another reason that some people don’t do this route is because you need to have less than 17 foot clearance to get through some bridges. John added a hinge for the radar and satellite domes so that we could go this way. The boat looks funny without the canvas on the back and the hinge laying down but you can see we just make it through some bridges. It was scary for me and I had John measure this 20 times before we got here.
Since we are only doing the so called triangle loop this year, we are putting our boat in Winter Harbor in Brewerton, NY this winter in heated storage. Canada is too beautiful to rush through it. Next year we will finish the Trent Severn and the Georgian Bay and continue with the rest of the loop.
It started to rain hard right after we left and we had to wear our rain jackets and rain pants through the first four locks.
The locks were easy to get through because we didn’t have to wait for any traffic but having to do the locks in the rain was not fun. We stayed at the Fort Edward yacht basin which is a free wall with free electricity and restrooms.
We walked downtown and found it to be almost like a ghost town. That night we had ham, scalloped potatoes and corn on Greek’s Folly. Good comfort food after a long day of being wet. The next morning we left around 9 AM and went through locks 7, 8, 9, and 11.
For some reason there is no lock 10. Again we stayed on a free dock in the town of Whitehall. Again, we were able to hook up to electricity. This free dock was just before you get to Lock 12.
This town is not quite the ghost town that Fort Edward was but it’s pretty close. It was hard to find somewhere to eat so we walked around town quite a while and finally found Joe’s pizza. After we got there, we found out that Joe’s had free delivery. Oh well, it was good to stretch out the legs after riding on the boat all day.