Erie Canal - Eastern Half and Oswego - July 2008
The Erie canal is a 340-mile waterway that winds its way from Waterford, just north of New York's capital city of Albany, to Buffalo - that city on eastern Lake Erie that made chicken wings famous.
We traveled the eastern section of the Erie last year when we did the mini-loop, but this year we wanted to see the entire canal as well as the Finger lakes of Cayuga and Seneca. So far we have traveled from Waterford to Syracuse, making a detour up to Oswego on Lake Ontario for the big Oswego Harborfest celebration.
We spent two wonderful days in Waterford, including the one day taking the bus back to Albany to get our cruising guide.
Shortly after leaving Waterford, we met Tony
Fleming on his Fleming 65
yacht 'Venture' docked on a lock wall above lock 8 on the canal.
Tony also started his trip from the west coast, as we had, although he brought Venture around to the east coast via the Panama Canal - whereas we 'cheated' and had Tardis trucked across country on the flatbed of a boat transport truck.
He graciously invited us over and gave us the grand tour - including, to Jeremy's delight, a tour of the engine room.
It's not every day that you get to met a yacht designer traveling on a boat that he designed, so it was a wonderful opportunity to find out what he has tried over the years - what worked out and, certainly just as important, what didn't.
Flemings are indeed beautiful and very well designed yachts. I confess that I've always had a soft spot for them. It's what Tardis wants to be when she grows up.
Sorry, Tardis, I don't mean it! I do love our little boat - especially when it comes time to dock her. It's ever so much easier to find a spot for a 34-foot boat than a 65-footer.
Our next stop along the way was at the town of Amsterdam. They were having a Canal Days celebration, complete with lots of Latin music during the day, a concert from the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra in the evening and a fireworks show that night. We enjoyed the concert and fireworks from the top of Tardis.
The fireworks were shot off very close to where we were docked, but we were assured that we'd be OK.
That was until the wind shifted a bit and started to blow then over the top of us....
I shot this last picture of a fireworks exploding overhead - and then felt something VERY hot in my lap. It seems that a piece of burning cardboard had drifted down and into my lap! I suppose that is what can happen when they are shooting them right over you head. I jumped up and started doing a little dance trying to put it out. Fortunately Jeremy had thought to bring a fire extinguisher up to the top of the boat - 'just in case.' Even more fortunately he didn't see the burning cardboard land in my lap and then empty the fire extinguisher on me. I managed to put it out with only a few small burns on my legs. Next time I think we'll dock the boat a bit farther away...
The next day, we continued on down the canal to Schoharie Crossing where there were more Canal Days festivities. Schoharie Crossing is an interesting site from a canal history perspective since it contains artifacts from all three of the incarnations of the Erie Canal:
The original Erie canal included 18 aqueducts which carried the canal over ravines and rivers. With the widening and re-routing of the Erie canal over the years, only one aqueduct remains. It is located on the western end of the canal, which we will get to pass through when we get to that portion of the canal in a few weeks. I'm really looking forward to that as we have never yet taken our boat through an aqueduct!
The remains of the aqueduct at Schoharie Crossing is from the second iteration of the canal. On the original canal, barges were pushed across Schoharie creek - which was a very dangerous proposition, especially in the spring when the creek was flowing hard. They had build a series of dams across the creek to try to stem the flow, but the aqueduct provided a much safer and better alternative.
This is a view of the aqueduct remains from the front. The wider section on the right hand side was the towpath for the mules that pulled the barges along the canal.
We saw this way cool toy airplane at the Canal Days festival at Schoharie Crossing. I would have loved to have one of these when I was a kid!
Leaving Schoharie Crossing, our next stop was Canajoharie. This town, as so many towns in upstate NY, is going through a rough transition period. Canajoharie has been the hometown of the Beech-Nut Nutrition Company since 1898, although the business actually started 7 years earlier in 1891 under the name of the Imperial Packing Company. Bartlett Arkell, a co-founder and President of the company from it's inception until 1941, really loved the town and the surrounding area. But time moves on, and all things must eventually change. After 117 years, Beach-Nut is closing their plant and headquarters in Canajoharie and moving to a new facility in Florida NY. The good news is that the new plant is only about 20 miles away and the company is working hard to help its employees transition to the new facility. The bad news is that the town of Canajoharie is sort of left holding the bag in that the factory accounts for about a third of the town's utilities. With the company gone and the factory vacant, the town will have to cover the cost of the now surplus utilities and infrastructure.
Bartlett Arkell was an avid art collector. Between 1924 and his death in 1946, Arkell acquired over 300 oil paintings, watercolors and works of sculpture for the collection. In 1924, Arkell founded the Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery as the both town's public library and a museum of American Art. Included in his collection are several paintings by Andrew Wyeth. It's a wonderful museum which we thoroughly enjoyed visiting.
The picture to the left below is of the Canajoharie Academy. Susan B. Anthony taught here in 1846. I snapped the picture on the right in the morning in Canajoharie. There was a soft veil of fog over the canal and the Canadian Geese were just waking up.
The town of Little Falls sits high up on the banks of the Mohawk river. This was considered the western frontier in the 1700's and early 1800's - before the Erie canal opened the area to the west to travel.
Every so often as you travel along the Erie canal, you pass under a set of guard gates, like the ones shown in the picture below. They are there to help to control the water levels, whether from flooding or draught. Fortunately, we've never seen them closed!!
Well, after having Tardis, the little tug that could, for almost 5 years we finally got to be a tugboat. We were traveling along one day when we heard a call over the radio that someone had run aground. It turned out to be a Nordic Tug - and not only had he run aground, but he had managed to run aground such that his water inlet was actually out of the water for a short period of time. He missed a mark on the canal and thinks that he ran up on some sort of rock ledge. Another, much larger, boat that was going the other way was able to 'wake' him off, but he soon realized that he wasn't going to get too far since his engine was overheating badly after the grounding.
We took him in tow up to AND THROUGH the next lock. Wasn't that fun, boys and girls??? It's exciting enough maneuvering your own boat into the concrete lined chamber of a lock without towing another large boat in behind you. But we actually did very well. We found out that we had to use a bridle to tow him since trying to tow off one side only caused us to go sideways when we tried to go forward. It was like trying to leave with a line still attached to the dock! Of course he was a little bigger than us as well (37 feet to our 34), so that probably didn't help either.
We got him through the lock and tied to the wall on the other side, and then the fun began. Bill (the owner of the Nordic) and Jeremy worked on getting the old impellor out. Not good - it only had 2 of the original 12 blades intact. After they press-ganged the new impellor into place (always a fun job at the best of times), they then went in search of the missing bits. Bill tried to start it up and the water flow was still not good - so they ended up stripping the heat exchanger and transmission water cooler in their search for bits. When they finally got it all put back together it was 7PM. We were all tired and hungry, so we pressed on to Utica to tie up and get dinner.
The good news was that Bill reported that his engine now runs about 5 degrees cooler than before!
The second photo was the sunset as we were traveling on to Utica in the early evening.
The next night we headed on a bit farther along and tied up to a lock just west of Rome, NY nearby the location where they first started to dig the Erie Canal. We rode our bikes back the 6 miles to the Erie Canal Village which marks the site of the beginning of 'Clinton's Ditch' as it was often called in those days.
The Erie Canal Village contains several buildings from the time period in which the canal was first dug, including homes, a one-room school house, and a blacksmith shop. Perhaps my favorite thing at the village was the old horse-drawn canal barge on which you take a short trip down the canal being drawn along by 2-horse power.
I'll tell you with the current rising cost of diesel, I was sorely tempted to see if we could hitch 'Tardis' up to the team for a short way down the canal.
We soon reached the Oswego canal and turned north to head up to Oswego for the Harborfest celebration. We stopped at the small town of Phoenix and were soon joined by our friends on our favorite NY canal tugboat, the Urger.
Phoenix is home to the Bridge House Brats. It's the first time I've seen kids so proud to be called a Brat! The kids were wonderful, though. The older kids helped to tie up the boat and the younger kids (like Alexis and Teona below) provided tours of their most excellent club house - the old 3-story lock house.
Did I mention that the Brats also bring you free hot coffee in the morning as well as any breakfast you'd care to order from a local cafe??
Ah, Harborfest - that amazing party in Oswego. We stayed up above lock 7, where there was plenty of room (we were the only boat there). All of the party boats headed into the harbor and rafted out for the PAR-TAY!
Even M came. So nice to see that he remembered his life jacket!
The river was running much faster this year than we remembered from last year. The picture to the right below shows the difference between the fast-running river and the very still canal. Last year there were folks swimming in the river - didn't see that this year.
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts provided one of the several free concerts in the park. We hate her! She's 49 and she looks like she's maybe 29. It was a great concert! She played all the old favorites like Crimson and Clover and I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL!!!
The boat in the picture to the right was all lit up for the boat parade.
There were kids doing stunts on their dirt bikes ....
... and dogs doing tricks catching frisbees. I think these were called the Disco Dogs. They were pretty neat. I especially liked the one in the middle - 'Look, I can catch it with my paws! Who needs opposable thumbs??'
Dog catches Frisbee, Man catches Dog - I think that's only fair.
Updated July 29, 2008