August 15, 2021: The Mohawk River, the Erie Canal, and nine locks.
Our dock at Waterford was walking distance from Lock #2 on the Erie Canal and Capt Paul wanted to be through it as soon as it opened at 7 AM. So at 7 AM, were drifting right outside the entrance to the lock, trying to raise the lockmaster on the radio.
I had just enough time at Waterford that morning to shoot this photo back at Nano and the boats that had come in behind her before we pulled out on our day’s journey to Amsterdam.
Waterford Flight of Five
Waterford, on the Erie Canal is well known for two things: its position on the far east end of the Erie Canal and its grouping of five closely spaced locks, each raising boats 30 to 35 feet. The Canal Corporation wants boaters to go through all five at a time — in other words, no loitering between them. When you go through them, it’s pretty obvious why: there isn’t much space between them and, if you had boats going in both directions and some of them were stopping for lunch or photos or the night, it would soon get clogged with traffic.
Here’s a shot down an intersecting dead end canal between locks 2 and 3. It was a gorgeous morning, with just a touch of mist on the surface of the water.
Here’s a section of canal between two of the early locks. There was a huge rusting barge parked alongside the canal wall there. Did I mention that it was really a gorgeous morning?
Capt Paul was doing the driving, and that was fine with me. I really wasn’t ready to do any close quarters driving. The locks all worked pretty much the same way. We’d reach the downriver side of the lock and if nothing seemed to be going on, he’d call the lockmaster to let him know we were there. My version of the call, which was very close to Capt Paul’s, went something like this: “Lock two, lock two, lock two. This is the motor vessel Nano. Westbound requesting lock up.” Lock up, of course, means you’re entering a lock to rise up. Lock down would be the opposite.
Outside lock #3. The gates are open. You can’t really see it in this size, but the light on the right side of the lock is green.
When the lock doors open, a traffic light at the entrance might or might not turn green. It should, but it doesn’t always seem to work that way. At one lock, the red light went out and the green light never came on. At another, the green light was on the whole time, even when the gate was closed. At yet another, the lockmaster never bothered to switch the lights. Conclusion: the lights are not reliable.
When the gates open, Capt Paul drives in. Slowly — but not as slowly as me. We’re supposed to go to the far end of the lock, but so far we’ve only shared a lock with other boats — two of them — once. So, with the lock all to ourselves, we wind up somewhere in the middle. He slows to nearly a stop, drifting forward as he uses the bow and stern thrusters to push us against the wall. Honestly, I can’t imagine doing this without the thrusters.
In each lock, there are ropes hanging down from the top of the wall. I grab one from the bow and Dianne grabs another from the stern. Capt Paul uses reverse thrust, if necessary, to bring us to a complete stop. When he’s sure we have both ropes, he kills the engine.
And then we wait. Locking through is all about waiting. If you’re the kind of person who is always in a hurry, you should not be locking through on the Erie Canal.
In this shot, we’re inside the chamber of Lock #3 but the doors haven’t started to close yet. You can see that Dianne is already holding her rope; I’ve got mine. (I wouldn’t take a picture before I’d done my job.)
Usually, the entrance gates start to swing shut even before we’ve secured the boat. By the time we have, the gates are closed. Then, after a few minutes, water starts to fill the lock from somewhere under us. The water seems to boil up sometimes. There’s sometimes a current that tries to rip the rope out of your grasp. And the boat begins to rise.
Each of the locks have a sign like this.
It rises slowly. Remember, this is a waiting game. The farther up you have to go, the longer it takes. The whole time, we’re changing our grip on the ropes to higher positions until we’re holding on where it’s tied to the top of the lock chamber wall.
Eventually, the water level around you matches the water level of the canal on the other side of the lock gates ahead of you. Nothing happens for a few more minutes. Then the gates ahead of you begin to open.
My brother, who watches various narrowboat shows on Amazon Prime, pointed out the SILL warnings on those canals in a video I watched with him. So I took this picture to send him. Basically, you never want your boat between the SILL marker and the lock gate on the way down.
All the while, there are all sorts of gawdawful clanging and grinding noises that seem to fill the lock chamber. These noises start when the lock gates start to close and don’t quit until the other lock gates are fully open. Between the sound of the mechanisms and the rushing of water leaking through the high side gates even before the low side gates are closed, it’s a very noisy affair.
Once the gates are about halfway open, Capt Paul starts the engine and tells us to cast off. We release the ropes. He uses bow and stern thrusters to push the boat away from the wall and motors on out slowly.
And that’s it.
To give you an idea how how long this takes, consider that it took us 90 minutes to go through the first five locks that Sunday morning — to travel less than five miles.
Did I mention that this isn’t for folks in a hurry?
The Eastern End of the Mohawk River
The Erie Canal sits in the dredged bed of the Mohawk River for quite a bit of its eastern end. After going through the fifth lock (Lock #6) and past two guard gates, the canal joined the river just upstream of the Crescent Dam. From that point, it follows the often wide and winding path of the river for dozens of miles. Each time the river makes a significant drop, a dam holds the water back downstream of the rapids, thus removing the rapids, and a lock beside the dam enables boats to climb up.
Here’s part of the chart where the Erie Canal joins the Mohawk River west of Waterford.
One of the two guard gates between Lock 6 and the junction with the Mohawk River west of Waterford. These can be closed to stop water and traffic from coming through.
In this area, the Mohawk River banks were full of wetlands with tall, wading birds and vacation homes with lawns that sloped down to the river and docks with boats. It looked like a vacation home paradise. Imagine living on a navigable body of water that you could just hop onto in your backyard boat!
Oddly, although it was a beautiful Sunday morning, we saw very few boaters. Most of the boats we saw carried fishermen. Maybe it was too early for recreational boating?
The river wound back and forth on a meandering path that went, overall, to the west. Sometimes the channel was as wide as the river while other times it was very narrow, defined with standard red and green buoys — remember, red right return — on the right or left or down the center of the river’s flow.
Here’s the downriver side of Lock 8. The dam holds back water on the Mohawk River while the lock (on the left here) raises us to the new water level of the river. We went through this lock with that fishing boat and a police boat behind us.
We used autopilot heading hold for almost all of our steering. Set a heading, tell the autopilot to hold it, and then tap a + or – button to increase or decrease the heading one degree at a time. It worked well unless you had to make a sharp turn to avoid a floating log or other debris. There wasn’t much of this at the beginning of our trip, but in some places later on there was quite a bit.
Sometimes, alongside us but never really in view, the charts told us the old Erie Canal — the original barge canal finished in 1821 — was off to one side or another of the river’s course.
We passed a number of marinas along the way and slowed down to No Wake speed — 1500 RPM gave us about 5 knots — as we passed each one. Schenectady, Mohawk Valley, Mohawk Harbor, Scotia, Arrowhead. We also passed a number of free docks, usually made available by towns to attract visitors by water. We drove by all of them. Our final destination for the day was Amsterdam and we wouldn’t stop until we got there.
During this time, we all got a chance to drive and try our hand at entering and maneuvering in a lock. I did okay. I go very slowly — sometimes too slowly for the rudder to work — and am not afraid to use the thrusters to swing the bow around if I need to. One time, exiting a lock, I used the thrusters in the wrong direction. That almost got very ugly, but I figured out what I was doing wrong right around the same time Capt Paul used the boat hook to push us off the lock wall. I think it was our joint effort that prevented a bang.
Don’t get me wrong — we have fenders. In fact, we have the big ball ones specifically for going through locks. They are must-haves and I think they do a great job of protecting the boat.
We drove a total of 32 nautical miles, locking through nine locks along the way. We arrived in Amsterdam at 1:30 PM.
Here’s my Nebo log for Day 6 of my trip. You can track me every day in the Nebo boating app. Just look for Nano Paul G.
At Amsterdam
Parking at Amsterdam was at a dock in what’s known at Riverlink Park. It’s a wall with a path running along the top of it with electricity “kiosks” spread along the length. We were the only boat there.
No one came out of the building there to greet us.
We landed, tied up, connected to shore power, and tested the power. All good. Then we used a hose to top off our water tank, which had dropped to less than 1/4 full. That done, we started searching for lunch.
And this was the problem: most of the lunch options we found were closed. It was Sunday, after all.
The restaurant at the park was closed until Tuesday. The chicken place less than 1/4 mile away was closed. Numerous other places Google teased us with were closed. We chatted with a guy in the park and he suggested “the Chinese place.” We found it: Peking. It was open. Google told us how to walk there. It was not close.
Riverlink Park gets its name from an overhead walkway that links the city to the waterfront. The walkway starts down in the park with a three flight climb — there is an elevator, but Capt Paul and I took the stairs. Once up there, there’s a fenced in walkway that crossed the railroad tracks — the same tracks carrying the trains we’d hear all night — and a highway. It ended on the roof a building with parking for the park. Staying on the path, you descend on a ramp into a parking area between two strip malls. One contains an Ace Hardware that was still open that Sunday afternoon and the other contains the closed chicken joint and a handful of other businesses.
Paul left us to go into the Ace. We carried on, following the instructions Google provided. They were direct and good instructions. What wasn’t so good was the depressed and neglected area we had to walk through, part of which was on something resembling a highway exit ramp. It was a long walk and it was all uphill. Not steep, but pretty much never ending. Dianne and I were sweating up a storm when we finally arrived at the restaurant.
“If the place is empty and the air conditioning is on,” I made the mistake of saying, “I think we should eat in there.”
We’d been eating outdoors as much of possible because of COVID fears. But I was hot. Dianne agreed.
But although the place was empty, it wasn’t set up for inside dining. Just a few tables had chairs, there were no napkins, and there were no condiments. And it didn’t seem very clean. I immediately regretted my words outside just moments before.
We went to the counter and ordered. I was hungry and I wanted to avoid a future walk so I ordered two main courses, figuring I could store one in the fridge, and paid. As Dianne was ordering, Paul came in. He ordered and paid, too. Dianne led us to one of the tables and we sat down to wait.
When the food came, Paul suggested that we go back to the park and eat at one of the nice outdoor restaurant tables in the shade. The place was closed, so why not? I didn’t want to eat in the restaurant, so I agreed. I don’t think Dianne was happy about it, but she joined us.
The walk back was better with “gravity assist.” I can walk very quickly downhill. Soon we were crossing the walkway and heading down the stairs.
Capt Paul and I took a table on the patio behind the restaurant. Dianne chose to eat alone outside the patio area. Maybe she had phone calls to make.
The food was terrible. One of the dishes I ordered tasted as if corn syrup had been added. The other had very little flavor at all. I didn’t eat much. Paul ate about half of his. I think Dianne finished hers, she had nothing to stow in the fridge.
The restrooms were locked. There were port-o-poties outside the restaurant and I avoided them until the next morning, choosing the boat’s head instead. There were no showers. No laundry. No groceries. It was a painfully dull and featureless place to spend the night.
It’s three days later and I honestly can’t remember how I spent the afternoon. Did I nap? Did I work on blog posts? Who knows? Probably blog posts since it seems that I finished my Day 5 post before this stop.
There was a nice sunset.
Amsterdam did treat us to a nice sunset, so there’s that.
The train noise didn’t keep me up. After all, I had my earplugs in.
