We're in Sackets Harbor, NY. We cleared the last lock of the Oswego Canal this morning and cruised over the East end of Lake Ontario to Sackets Harbor. The only problem was that I had left the antenna poles up and bent one going under an overhanging structure above the lock. Ouch! It was easily fixed with two hose clamps, but I'll have to replace the fiberglass pole this winter. Just one more thing to add to my winter "to do" list.

Lake Ontario was smooth for the crossing with waves of only about 1 ft. These are the islands of Stony Point on Lake Ontario near Sackets Harbor. It was a flybridge day, but very hot and hazy. I decided to burn some fuel and plane the boat just to make more breeze on the flybridge.

Sackets Harbor is a quaint little "single mainstreet town" with nice restaurants, a couple of little museums, antique stores, a really good bakery and a battlefield from the War of 1812, and, of course, a mansion of Colonel Agustus Sacket built in 1801.

The Sackets Harbor battlefield was where the British invaded from Canada during the War of 1812 to try to interrupt American naval and military activity in the upper St. Lawrence valley. They were replused by the American troops here. Today, the battlefield is just a field, though well maintained and signed to explain the battle along a walking trail. This is an 1810 British canon found in the St. Lawrence River near here and now displayed at the battlefield. Unfortunately, during the battle an inexperienced American lieutenant thought things were going badly and gave the signal to burn the American supplies and munitions so they wouldn't be captured by the British.

The "Seaway Trail Discovery Center" museum was an old hotel, now displaying artifacts found in the area and a floor dedicated to scuba diving the old wrecks found in these waters. It's primarily aimed and school age children ("discovery center"), so it's not that interesting to adults. Kathy says we've become blase about seeing little underfunded museums. However, Kathy was able correctly line up the picture blocks and make the light go on for correct answers to what the local fish eat and weigh, where a deer eats and lives, and what a beaver eats and where it lives. Who says we didn't learn anything today? For my part, I learned that the bakery makes good rolls, so I'm going to walk there before breakfast tomorrow.

We're in Oswego, NY at the end of the Oswego Canal.

It's a free dock at a wide spot in the canal right before the last lock and Lake Ontario. We're staying here one day so I could put up the radar arch so we're ready for big lakes cruising and anchoring out. With the arch down, we can't use the dinghy, the radar, the satellite TV dish or the bimini on the flybridge. I hope we can leave it up for the Trent Severn Canals in Canada because the lowest bridges are 2 ft. higher than the Erie Canal. That should have us clearing the lowest bridges by less than a foot! I'll have to go slow and inch up to them.

Yesterday we completed the Erie Canal and turned North up towards Lake Ontario at Oswego. We stopped for lunch at Phoenix, NY which is a teeny, economically depressed town on the canal. It's cute because the locals have fixed up the town docks for cruisers to stop free, added picnic tables with umbrellas, restored an old bridge house for a defunct lift bridge and during summer the local school kids all wait at the docks to help cruisers and run to the local stores for them for food. They call it the "Bridge House Brats". They all have T-Shirts with that on them. Not much else to do in a teeny town in summer, I guess and cruisers are the only source of income coming by.

Today, we walked over to see Fort Ontario in Oswego. It was first built as a Brittish fort in the 1730s and then changed hands between England, France and the new United States about 5 or six times.

Oswego was very critical to England before 1776 because France controlled all of the Great Lakes except for this one small area around Oswego. This was England's only stronghold in the Great Lakes prior to the French and Indian Wars in the 1760s. In the chart above, shown in the fort, Brittish lands, in red, were all of New England with this one point on the Great Lakes, while France controlled everything shown in green. France later lost all of the Great Lakes and Canada to England and then sold (under duress) the Louisiana Purchase to the United States.

The fort is really very nicely restored, including the officer's quarters above.

Tomorrow, we're going across the Eastern end of Lake Ontario to Sackett's Harbor, which is close to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. I had 2 days in the cruise plan to wait for possible waves on Lake Ontario, but the forecast is for 1 to 2 ft. waves. Nice!

We're in Brewerton, NY. We got a nice rental car for $19.99 per day (weekend special) to go see the Finger Lakes, NY area.

Finger lakes It is an area of beautiful rolling hills, lakes and many vinyards.

We drove to Corning, NY to see the Corning Glass Museum. It is a very large museum, filled with glass not only from Corning, but from every area of the world and every age from 3,000 BC to 2002.

I won't put a dozen pictures of glass in the blog, but here is sculptural glass.

Antique glass.

Tiffany glass.

And an amazing collection of Harvard College botanical specimens, all made from glass, that looked exactly like the actual plants and were used for biological studies.

On the way back to the boat, we stopped by Taughannock Falls state park.

The falls is higher than Niagra Falls and set in a very picturesque canyon. The canyon has been cut by the river through a shale rock area by the river. It's more like a creek today, but after heavy rains, it's a thundering maelstrom.

The downstream river bed is hard shale, almost like slate, so it's fun to walk in the shallow running water with the nice smooth stone bottom.

We drove to Canandaigua, NY to see the Sonnenberg Mansion, which is a huge 1890s mansion in the finger lakes area. We enjoyed touring the interior rooms and the many gardens.

Oops!

We were going to cross Oneida Lake today, but there has been a 25 MPH breeze all day and there are 4 ft. waves across the lake. So, we'll stay in Sylvan Beach, NY tonight and go on to Brewerton tomorrow. We were going to stay in Brewerton for 3 days anyhow, so now we'll just stay for 2 days.

More Erie Canal Days
We're at Rome, NY today. The dock is just a wide spot in the Erie Canal with a nice, straight dock to tie up. It's a free public dock, but there's no electric or water available, so we'll run the generator some and we have lots of water in our tanks. There are lots of stores, an old fort and a good restaurant in walking distance, but it's 95 degrees out today, so we'll probably just stay inside in the air conditioning at least until dinner. The good restaurant provides free rides if you call them, so that's where we'll go for dinner.

The Erie Canal is partly the Mohawk River channels and party a dug canal. The river sections are pretty scenery with green mountains coming down to the river's edge.

The dug canal sections are mostly straight canals dug through the flat lands, so they're uninteresting. This section of canal is at the highest point of the Erie Canal, so for the last 3 days we were going up through locks and tomorrow we'll start going down in the locks.

We passed few boats on the canal today, maybe about a dozen total including some NY canal maintenance boats, other cruisers and this Erie Canal Tour Boat. It was about the size of Nonchalance, but it had 30 people on it.

Yesterday, we stayed in Ilion, NY at a "marina" (another wide spot in the Erie Canal, but with a few flag poles, electric and water hookups and $53 to stay overnight instead of free).

We had been passing bass fishing boats all day yesterday, but we just thought it was Sunday and the locals were out fishing. But when we pulled in to Ilion, there was a bass fishing tournament and they were just coming back in for the weigh-in. There were probably about 12 bass boats with 2 fishermen each. Everyody had a plastic sack full of water and live Smallmouth bass. The biggest one was about 2 1/2 lbs., about the size of the one Jim caught the same day in the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Oh you always know your neighbor... And you always know your pal...
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

I've been singing that all day.

We went through 10 locks on the Erie Canal today and we're now tied up to the canal wall above lock 11 at Amsterdam, NY.

These are similar locks to many that we went through on the rivers last Fall at the start of the trip. You go in to a huge empty chamber while doors at the high water side at the end are closed. Then they close the doors behind you and fill the chamber with water.

When it's full, the doors at the other end open and you sail out in a canal that's about 20 to 30 ft. higher than the one you were on before. The water where we're tied up tonight is about 250 ft. higher in elevation than the canal we started on today.

The scenery is quite nice.... mostly all trees and verdant hills surrounding the rivers and lakes that form the major part of the canal today.

I went up to the lock operators area to see the workings of the lock. This is the inside view of two of the many large electrical control cabinets that operate the locks. Even though they were built in 1915, they still look perfect. That's because while the canal is closed in the winters, the engineers lovingly restore every piece of equipment. The DC motors and huge lock gate gears all look as good as this switch cabinet, and are also original from 1915. Very impressive.

We also went for a walk along the old original Champlain canal segment near Waterford, NY. When it was built, the canal was only 40 ft. wide and 4 1/2 ft. deep. Long canal barges were pulled by mules along this footpath. Obviously, the trees between the footpath and the water weren't here then.

We're in Waterford, NY at the first mile of the Erie Canal. We cruised up to Troy, NY where the Mohawk River joins the Hudson. Then we went through the first lock into the Mohawk and the Erie Canal.

We passed more lighthouses on the way. This is the Hudson-Athens lighthouse.

We also saw this deer browsing on tree leaves at the river's edge. I guess it didn't read that yellow "no trespassing" sign on the tree.

Then we passed Albany, NY. We decided we didn't need another big city stopover, so we went on past Albany and Troy, NY to Waterford.

As the starting point of the Erie Canal, Waterford, NY has done an excellent job of welcoming cruisers. They have a free town dock over 1,000 ft. long with power and water hookups for boaters (in the first 500 ft. of dock). The top picture is the last 500 ft. of dock with Nonchalance the second boat from the right. We were the last boat to get power and water hookups, having arrived just after 3 PM. The bottom picture is the first 500 ft. of dock up by the Visitor Center. The white bricks in the wide sidewalk form a map of the Erie Canal with the various towns and locks chiseled into the bricks at appropriate places.

We'll stay here a day or two so I can put the radar arch down and ready the boat for canal cruising.

FDR country...

We've been tooling around the Catskills and Hyde Park area of the Hudson Valley for a couple of days to see what's here. It is really beautiful country. Lots of wooded mountains and the Hudson River.

Hyde Park and the Hudson Valley was the summer home area for very wealthy New York families like the Vanderbilts, Livingstons, Rockefellers, and Roosevelts. Around 1880 to 1900, they built lavish mansions here and furnished them in grand style. This is the birthplace, home and burial grounds of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His presidential library is also located on the grounds, all of which were donated to the United States by FDR. FDR and Eleanor expanded this home from a large house on the Hudson to a mansion in the 1930s.

The home was donated intact with all furniture and furnishings exactly as FDR used it, so here's FDR's bedroom exactly as he used it. It is very dim inside to protect it from sunlight damage and they don't allow flash pictures, so the pictures are as dark as the rooms were.
Eleanor's bedroom next door was rather sparse by comparison.

This is the Vanderbilt mansion about 2 miles North up the Hudson from the Roosevelt's. It's a huge carved sandstone example of what "gilded age" mansions looked like here. It was built around 1895 at a cost of over $2 million and after the Vanderbuilts died, their niece, who inherited it, couldn't sell it for $250,000, due to the Great Depression, so she donated it to the federal government at the same time as FDR donated his (and at his suggestion).
Then we visited the Rhinebeck Aerodrome today. It's an operating antique airplane museum and flying field. Unbelievably, they still fly some of these planes that are more than 50 years old. You may notice the oil catchpan under this 1942 Fleet biplane. That's because it's in flying condition! It was flown here, but many years ago.

This 1931 Great Lakes biplane is also in flying condition. There were about 200 of these built and they were the favorite acrobatic airplane for almost two decades.

They also had a very large number of antique airplane engines, like this 1930 Kinner B5 Rotary and this Hall-Scott V8 with exquisite workmanship and design. Most of these aircraft engines shared the concept of no solid engine block. The cylinders were simply bolted to the crankcase to save weight.

We also wet touring in the Catskill Mountains for a few hours. Very hilly and wooded terrain. We went around the Ashoken Reservoir (as in "Ashoken Farwell", the song Kathy and I play as a duet on piano and guitar). It's a beautiful spot that you can't see much of because it's a reservoir for New York City and there is absolutely no entrance to the hills surrounding it and no recreation or development on it's shores. They're so worried about pollution that it's strictly off limits for everything "except fishing by special permit" according to the signs. Right..... I wonder which NYC politicians you have to donate to in order to get a special fishing permit?

We're going to finish our Hudson River trip tomorrow by going up to Waterford, which is just North of Troy and Albany and is the start of the Eerie Canal leg of the trip. I'll have to lower the radar arch for low bridges on the canal systems.