Erie Canal Day 5 - Newark to Clyde

Morning in Newark. That's our little Nomad over there. This was a nice time of year to do this, so little traffic!

10/14/2016 - Newark to Clyde. 15 miles, 3 locks (28B, 28A, and 27). Another beautiful day, and we'll start out with a little more history. 

Remember these great murals I showed on the Day 2 post? Here they are again in case you missed them. 

They're on the abutment of the bridge shown above, with more on the outer wall of the boater services area, on the canal-level floor of the white building (the dockmaster's office is upstairs). They give some interesting historical information. Here are a couple of samples: 

This one's a little hard to read due to the texture of the wall and the angle of the morning sun, so I'll transcribe:

Jesse Hawley 

Grain (?)  Merchant

While in prison for debt, because he could not find an economical way to ship his goods, he published fourteen essays on the idea of the canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Hawley's essays were to prove immensely influential on the development of the Canal. 

This was a particularly good day for birds - I got my best heron shot of the trip, plus a nice one of a red-tailed hawk (anybody ever wondered if a redtail's hawk is really red?), and at one point a bald eagle flew low over the canal right in front of the boat. I was driving but TQ grabbed my camera and got a shot as the eagle circled over the trees.

We passed the Grouper again today. I'd brought the photo of the Grouper that I'd posted for my Day 2 trip report to the attention of Tugster, I only knew this tug's name because I'd seen her over there. I mentioned that I thought she had really nice lines, and he responded, "there are dozens with the same lines. Grouper has many siblings. At least one will survive if not she." Click here to visit Tugster's post showing a number of Grouper's sister Great Lakes tugs, a fleet dating back to the early 20th century, many of which are still being maintained and operated.

BTW, Tugster also said, "Btw, one could buy grouper now for $1, a 1912 machine for 100 pennies." I swear, if I knew either a little bit more or a little bit less about old boats...but on the off chance somebody who DOES know what they're doing happens to stumble across this, Click here for Tugster's email to get more info. He would really love to see someone take on this project! 

Back to the locks. Here are a few more pictures of locking through. I've understood the concept behind locks for as long as I can remember, I'm sure that was one of the nautical things my dad told me about when I was a kid, but seeing them at work I was really kind of blown away by the brilliant simplicity of the concepts - the big gates meeting at a slight outward angle so that the pressure of all those tons of water itself hold them firmly shut, and then the raising and lowering of the water level being done by simply opening valves and letting the water seek its own level, as it does. Pretty amazing, and very cool to see it in action. Lock 28 A. 

The lock masters were all very nice and almost every one of them asked us about our destination for the day - if we were going on to the next lock, they would call ahead so that the next lock master would know we were coming and have the lock all ready for us when we got there. As I'd mentioned, the lack of traffic was one of the benefits of an October trip!

Instructions

In Lock 27 at Lyons. Coming from upstream, we start with a nice view of the Canandaigua Outlet.

Going

Going

Gone! :D

Back to the Peppermint Capital of the World - 

And now we're down on the level of the outlet.

Erie Canal workboat waiting its turn

Workboat in Lock 27

Something tells me this might be Clyde.

Another nice waterfront park here

A couple of views of the town of Clyde

TQ had noticed that they had his favorite kind of park grill, so we hunted down a couple of steaks and some charcoal in town; I packed up some brussels sprouts and potatoes in foil packets to go under the coals while he got the fire going, it ended up being a terrific dinner. 

Lovely evening light

The big show here was the moon, nearly full here on our last night out on the Erie Canal. 

Erie Canal Day 4 Addendum - Old Lock 60 park

As promised, here are more pictures from the historic Lock 60 park. The Erie Canal I've been sharing with you recently is actually the 3rd version; the original one that opened in 1825 was immediately overwhelmed by its own success, with the amount of cargo being transported quickly exceeding the amount the planners had projected, and an expansion got underway in 1834. The first upgrade did involve some straightening of the original route in places, but a lot of the project just involved enlarging the original canal to allow for more traffic. This particular lock actually went through 2 separate improvements, first being enlarged, with a second lock being added later to allow vessels to lock through in both directions simultaneously. 

The final version of the Erie Canal, in 1918, saw the old canal replaced by the New York State Barge Canal. By this time the canal builders had learned more about flood control methods, and digging technology had improved, so in this version they were able to put many of the natural waterways to use. Where this meant the old route was abandoned, a lot of the old facilities are still there to see. This was one of them, and we really enjoyed taking a look at the lock. 

Most information from Wikipedia's Erie Canal page (although you'll see a good bit of it is on the info sign I took a picture of there).

BTW, reading about the work that was put in to allow the Erie Canal to achieve its maximum potential reminds me of a fascinating article I read in the NY Times recently. Not much commercial shipping on the Erie Canal these days, but there is a lock on the Ohio River that dates back to not that long after the final version of the Erie Canal that shipping does rely on heavily -- and that is evidently getting to be a problem.


Here are the photos! Click on the first one for a slideshow view. 

Erie Canal Day 4 - Fairport to Newark

Rainy-morning breakfast

Eastbound, locks 30 and 29. 17.3 nautical miles.

10/13/16 - The day began with rain, so we slept in and then just lazed in bed for a while enjoying the sound of the rain on the cabin top for a while before we went for our morning ablutions. Back on the boat, TQ asked me what I was thinking of for breakfast and I said "How does French toast, chorizo, and eggs sound?" and surprise, surprise he was OK with that. I even customized our French toast - the grocery store where we'd picked up our provisions had King's Hawaiian dinner rolls, which I of course insisted on getting, and I made my French toast with a couple of those, and TQ's with sourdough (he's lucky, he hasn't got half the sweet tooth I do). Came out delicious! And yes, that's real NY state maple syrup. 

We finally got underway around noon, by which time the rain had mostly stopped. It stayed overcast for a while, but the wind picked up and it gradually turned into yet another lovely day. 

Eastbound now, back where we came from.

Our first stop for the day was at the Mid-Lakes Marina, which Cruise-USA had recommended as a good place to stop for fuel; we'd been told that the fuel gauge was accurate, and it wasn't giving us any cause for concern but we were getting into the range of engine hours at which point we'd been told it was a good idea to refill, so topping off here made sense. The marina manager was a very nice lady, this was not our most graceful docking and she didn't raise so much as an eyebrow, just caught our lines, gave us a friendly greeting, and asked how she could help us today. We got the gas, we also decided to go ahead and pay for a pump-out here (most of the towns have free or very cheap pumpout facilities but we just figured we might as do that too while we were there, one less thing to worry about), I got a few more postcards, and then we headed on our way. Good recommendation.

This turns out to be one of the places where you can rent one of these English-style narrowboats, and they also offered day cruises on the Emita II. Seemed to be a nice operation. 

My journal says "No problems at Lock 30" - I think we may have been a little unnerved by our klutzy docking at the marina because by this time we were fairly comfortable with this procedure, so it's kind of odd I even mentioned it. Went fine though. No particular mention of (or even photos of) Lock 29, I may at this point have been feeling like I had enough lock pictures. 

Another heron. So many herons! 

Old Erie Canal Lock 60 park, with remnants of Erie Canal, version 2. This was cool enough that I'm going to give it its own post, we'd spotted it as we were heading for Fairport the day before but since we were meeting folks there we didn't want to stop; today we had a shorter distance to travel and no particular time we had to be anywhere, so we did.  

We got to Newark a little after 5, went for a little stroll after getting ourselves all sorted out. We met one very friendly local - he was sitting on those steps looking very photogenic, but when I stopped to take a picture of him he came right over to say hello. 

We just wandered around for a while

Came back to find the moon rising - getting closer to full. 

End of another fine day.