Saturday July 3, 2021.
Temp: 76/61, Humidity: 50/100%, Top Wind: N10 mph, Precip: none!, Miles Traveled: 26 in 5.5 hours, #of Locks: 5
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Today would be an interesting day, and we were pretty sure we were as ready for it as we could be. We wanted to put Island Girl into a panini press for today’s adventure, but since that isn’t really an option, we just had to get her sleeked down as much as possible. So we put her in go-fast mode and she has her “go-fast-ears” on. Years ago we had a Brittany dog, and when she was really happy or riding in the boat or car, she would tuck her ears back, in close to her head, and we called it her ‘go-fast-ears’. Today, Island Girl needed go-fast-ears because we would be going under the lowest bridge of the Erie Canal. This is THE lowest clearance one that establishes the height limit for transiting the canal west of Three Rivers. All of her antenna are laid back, anchor light laid back, her radar is removed, and the highest point is the little Garmin mushroom. And it’s kind of at a tie with the top of the bimini canvas, so let’s hope that’s low enough. When we measured for the fourteenth time, we came up with 15’ 3”. The lowest bridge is recorded as 15’6”. 😵💫
The other reason we wanted to panini press her is that we would also be transiting the shallowest water part of the canal today. Locks 29 & 30 are just 3 miles apart. Just above lock 29, some kind of dam broke last month, which has lowered the entire 3 mile pool between the locks by about four to five feet. All of the information that we’ve read is that boats that draft five feet or more are not currently allowed to transit this section. We draft anywhere from 3’6” to 3’9”…. probably closer to 3’9” since we’re full of fuel and in fresh water. Wouldn’t it be nice if THE bridge was in this section of water? Then there would be no problem. But no – it is after Lock 30. The yellow circle shows where something broke and let all the water run out.
It was a cloudy and cool morning, we called the lock that is right here in Lyons just after 7:00, it opened up and away we went.
Apparently there wasn’t anything fabulous after that, because my next picture is the next lock. Oh wait – that’s because it was just one whole mile to Lock 28. This one was a 20’ lift.
The lockmaster was an older guy and super nice. He told us about some of the local history, and this big barge was the last steam shovel to work on dredging the canal. It is no longer in use, and nobody has decided to refurbish it for a museum or historical piece yet, but he keeps hoping that somebody will.
Then he pointed out this little planter, which is one of the original plow shovels that was used in digging the canal. The entire 363 miles of the original Erie Canal was dug in just eight years, and was completed in 1825 – making transit from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Troy/Albany on the Hudson River possible. Can you imagine? It would take us more than eight years just to get permits these days!!
We tootled along on our cloudy cool day, and rarely saw any other life on the water. Occassionally we’d see a New York Canaligator, otherwise known as a log, waiting to bite us. And this one was big, right in the center of the canal! We tiptoed around it without incident.
As we approached this bridge, the book said it was just over 16’ so we shouldn’t worry about it. But we thought it would be interesting to see how tall it was, so Kenny stood on a stool on top of the hardtop in back and I coasted us through.
It looked really close from my perspective! But he put up a tape measure just to see, and it was actually 30” taller than us?! That doesn’t seem possible. It looked like we were getting a crewcut to me. EEK!
Our next lock was 28B and it was a 12’ lift. We’ve been locking on the port side today which is nice for the Captain, since the helm is on the port side… it’s a little bit easier for him to see everything that I’m doing as I’m grabbing lock ropes.
Soon after was the town of Newark New York. They had some fun murals painted on the bridges.
This one was really bright and clean.
Then there were two more under the bridge.
I’m not sure the significance of elephants! There is a free wall in Newark, and there were several boats here, including some sailboats. I think this is where the deep draft boats have been waiting to see if the canal can fix anything up ahead between locks 29 & 30 so that they can go through.
About nine miles later we came to Palmyra. They actually have a little basin off of the canal to pull into, which is nice. Their low wall has power and is free. I was surprised that there weren’t more boats here. I don’t know where the town is from here, but I read that it’s a nice stop. We kept going.
Next up was lock 29. It is supposed to be a 16’ lift.
The walls inside the lock were really bad, so we had to keep Island Girl off the wall as much as we could to keep the fenders from getting stuck.
This was right in front of me… and easy but not good place for a fender to get lost!
You can see in this picture where the water line is on the wall, and where it should be, up at the moss line. As we were going up, when my feet got to the water line, the moss line was at my shoulders. So that is how low the water level is when these lock doors open. I’m 5’7” tall, so my shoulders are about 4’7”. That’s a lot of water to be missing out of the canal!
When we exited the lock, we could clearly see that the water level is really low, so we stayed right in the middle.
These poor docks aren’t even close to the water. We transited this entire section at 5mph, which is about the speed of a turtle after a couple of RedBulls.
The Lock 29 locktender gave us a sonar color chart of the shallowest spots of the canal between lock 29 & 30. Going out of lock 29 wasn’t bad… just stay in the middle. But approaching lock 30 was a challenge. First, there was this waterfall of water coming into the canal which caused a lot of current and wanted to push us over to the starboard side of the canal. It is very hard to steer when you’re at idle speed!!
Just so you know, green is good, yellow is caution, orange is bad, red is very bad for depth. I don’t know how deep green was, but we saw about 5’8” in that area. The pointy outty color to the left is where the stream was flowing in and it was shallow, so we wanted to be a bit starboard there. Then we needed to head for the lock entry wall on the port side and stay close to the wall since red was on the starboard side. The shallowest we saw was 5’, then as we were entering the lock it was deeper… probably because of the water pressure flushing out of the lock when they let all of the water out.
We had to wait for the lock, which was a little frustrating since they knew we were coming and we really wanted out of this shallow unknown depth canal. You can see on the wall how low the water is from normal.
The normal lock lift would be 16’, but it was 20’ for us today. Whew! We made it! As we came out of the lock, there was a little ‘for-hire’ canal boat wating to go in.
It was only three miles after that until we came to THE bridge. Apparently with the low water below lock 30, it’s also being kept a little low above lock 30. Kenny meaured when we went under this baby and we had two feet above us! Woo-Hoo! We made it through both big challenges unscathed today! We’re going to have to have some little beers when we land!
Kenny liked this guys park job.
Ta-DA! We found the village of Fairport – our destination for today. A whopping 26 miles and it took us 5.5 hours to get here.
My research told me that there would be power available on the port side of the canal before the bridge, and on both sides of the canal in between the two bridges of town. We saw space before the first bridge, so we grabbed it. We backed up as close as comfortable to another looper boat Wind Shift, and got ourselves all settled in.
And as promised…. little beers! We had a good voyage through trecherous waters, and we lived to tell about it without incident. YAHOO! 😉
We went to register with the harbormaster, and paid our $14/night. What a deal!!! I don’t know what this flower is, so it got to have it’s picture taken.
This lift bridge is at the west end of town, and is apparently quite the engineering weirdness, since there are no two angles the same on the thing. 🤷♀️
I fixed us some samiches for lunch, then Wind Shift invited us over for appetizers. They’d been to the local farmers market and had some yummy delectibles to share. One thing that was amazing was some “salt bread’ from the local bakery. It was SOOOOO good! I need to get some of that !
Afterwards we went exploring. The town has a distillery that I twisted Kenny’s arm to go to. Sometimes distilleries in small towns outside of Kentucky or Tennessee are not exciting, but this one was amazing! IronSmoke Distillery is in an old warehouse.
We thought it would be a tasting room, but boy were we wrong. It is huge inside, and they even have live music on the weekends. It is a full bar, they serve more than just their own distillations, but everything that they serve is local to New York. So Kenny got a flight of bourbon/whiskey, and I had a rum & coke.
The decor inside is so fun! That chandelier with the round balls had flickering lights. The music playing was like from the 1920’s, so it felt prohibitiony. The furniture is all antiques and mismatched. There were rocking chairs, dining room, couches, settees, etc.
This is their logo.
These are their bourbons. We tried the regular bourbon, which Kenny said tasted ‘young’… like it needs more time in the barrel. The Casket Strength was better. And Rosie’s Apple Pie was really good and sweet. All of their bourbons have a touch of smoke, because they smoke some of the grains. It just gives the liquor a little bit of a different and unique flavor.
Here’s a couple more shots of the place. I was relaxing in a rocking chair.
The tasting glasses were little tiny tulip glasses, so pinky up!
Some of the decor is almost steam-punkish. Those Edison bulbs are on little pulleys. And there is a glass pane wall between this room and the next room where the band plays with a big dance floor. The whole place felt like a combination of Disney’s Haunted Mansion meets Prohibition meets spooky warehouse. It was very cleverly done, and we loved it!
Right next door was a brewery that we didn’t expect, called Triphammer. (It wasn’t on my list of things to do here – how did I miss it?!). We wandered in, but there was only beer available, and none of them sounded awesome to Mr. Beer after imbibing upon bourbon. So we meandered back out.
On the other side of the distillery was Smokin Hot Chicks BBQ. Well yes, we soon found ourselves seated inside. It was a huge and very busy place, and their food was quite tasty!
We are really sad that everything that we have seen is going to be closed for the next two to three days for the holiday. (We keep forgetting what day it is.) It’s great for the employees, but kinda sucks for us. The bakery for the salt bread won’t be open until next Thursday. The distillery won’t be open again until Wednesday. We need to check on the other brewery in town and see what their story is. And there are three ice cream stores that need to be scoped out. Maybe something will be open tomorrow. We decided we’ll stay here at least two nights, since in all likelyhood, where ever we go next, everything will be closed Sunday & Monday too. Might as well stay plugged in here and enjoy the little ambiance of this spot. It seems like we’re on what I picture a little European town canal would be like. There’s even wifi, although it’s pretty weak this far from the center of town. And my AT&T signal is weak but not as bad as some places we’ve been, so at least I can load pictures and write this for you, even though it takes a long time. What else do I have to do that’s more important than that anyway, right?! 😘
Talk to you tomorrow. I think we’ll get our bikes down since it’s a high wall and we have a day to play.
Rock on Guys…. It dont get better than this… Or does it?