Locked and Loaded

31 locks in 4 days! We are celebrating our accomplishment with Veuve Cliquot that we put on ice the day we left and we may have had just a little too much of the bubbly.

We got back to the boat late Friday (28th) with our friends Dave and Lynn Lozon. Saturday we ran around stocking the boat with all the necessary items like old fenders and lines, boat hooks, work gloves, food, and vodka and although it was mid afternoon when we finished, we still set out for the Troy Lock,the first on the NY Canal System. We headed into the lock with a plan that quickly came unraveled; it really just became "somebody get a line around a cable and hold on" Of course we did all manage to hold the boat steady against the lock wall but we made it much harder on ourselves than we needed to. We decided that 1 lock was enough for today and put in for the night.

Sunday we were blessed with fabulous, sunny weather and knocked off a dozen more locks. After the 4th one we got a little cocky and thought we had a great process but then lock 6 threw us for a loop when nothing was set up as in the previous 5. All hands on deck! New Process! We learned to be flexible any way. It was one really long day but we managed to find an empty spot on a concrete wall in Canajoharie at about 7 p.m.(no shore power) so we tied up, ate shrimp cocktail for dinner and called it a night.

Monday was another beautiful day so we decided to try for Lake Oneida. All of the guidebooks warned that a 10 mph speed limit is strictly enforced through the canals but we met a local who said this was bunk so...techie Lynn said "Google it" We did and found that the local guy was right. The speed limit was 30mph through the part we ran yesterday - today's run is where it drops to 10. CRAP. Unfortunately the locks were father apart and seemed to take a lot longer to get through today even though we had perfected our technique: ) Dave was feeling the work of the previous day in his lower back so he asked Lynn to get him a couple of Aleves. Evidently he combined all of his pills into one bottle and Aleve and his sleeping pills look extremely similar. Our "Ship's Nurse" delivered the wrong meds and it took us the better part of the day to figure out why Dave was so groggy and quiet. We demoted him from "bow line tend-er" to the stern, figuring it was less distance to fall should he doze off midway through a lock.

We did finally make it to Lake Oneida and pulled up to the port just as a downpour broke the heat spell. We got soaked but had shore power, which translates to air conditioning at night without the sound of a generator to keep you awake.

Tuesday we treated ourselves to breakfast at a dive and got a late start on the water. We still managed to get through the rest of the locks and put in by 6 for our celebration. We laughed over the fact that Lynn warned us before agreeing to come, "I'll go but I'm not good crew - I'll watch Scrappy but I don't want to do lines or anything". Lynn ended up having the role of picking up the slack and trust me, there was always slack. Waiting on the Captain, grabbing the center line on the lock wall when the aft or bow line was missed by Dave or I, running up to the bridge to get a line that was too short to reach from the transom, running boat hooks to Dave and I, communicating Captain's commands out the side door to us (and often times softening the message to keep our morale up). The only thing she didn't have to do was watch Scrappy because he basically laid in the sun and wanted no part of our folly.

Tomorrow we head West on Lake Ontario to Rochester then Thursday it's off to Toronto for some culture!!!