Blue Horizon Adventures: Thurs Aug 5: Waterford to Blain’s Bay

In which we take flight…

We have done the Champlain Canal bit (vertical yellow line on right)-we will spend the rest of this year’s trip on the horizontal yellow line, the Erie Canal.

You have to zoom in to really see this, but it outlines all the locks in the area. There are 35 on the Erie alone. We are going to have some mad locking skills by the end…

Here is the chatter with which we began our day:

Me-Lock E2, this is Blue Horizon standing by on the Waterford dock. We are westbound and await your next opening.

Lock E2-copy that, give me a few minutes to prepare the lock

Me-copy, Blue Horizon standing by on 13 for the green light

Lock E2-E3, preparing to fill to lift one

Lock E3-copy….repeat for locks 3, 4, 5 & 6

Remember-this is what we have to get up and over today:

Cohoes Falls close to Albany, NY

Now I’m going to turn the mic over to Rick, so he can tell you in D-E-T-A-I-L about our first Erie flight!

So as Melanie says, we’ve entered the Erie Canal. This first set of 5 locks (numbered 2 - 6, not sure what happened to #1) is called the Waterford Flight. The locks lift us a total of 165 feet up to the canal above the roaring Cohoes Falls, in less than a mile. These falls are second only to Niagara Falls in the eastern USA for drop and they are impressive. The locks take us around one side, so you do not see the falls from the locks. Each lock lift uses about 3.5 million gallons of water to lift our boat between 33 and 35 feet (the largest lock on the canal, E-17, has a lift of 40 feet) and is done in close coordination with the locks above and below in order to keep the water level (the “pool”) at the same height, and to avoid a rush of water that might hit and damage a closed door.

There is an amazing amount of history here. The original canals were built between 1813 and 1826, and opened the area for commercial development and settlement. The original locks were 4 feet deep, 90 feet long and 15 feet wide. Within just a few years there was so much commercial activity on the canals that the locks were rebuilt/widened to 7 feet deep, 110 feed long and 18 feet wide. After that more canals were added and the canals were constantly improved to accommodate the growing activity.

As I’ve mentioned before, this area was always important for transportation (remember the Hudson/Champlain corridor?), but once the canals opened the area filled with “boom towns”. If you look at a map of upstate NY there is a line of cities - Albany, Schenectady, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Lyons, Rochester, Lockport and Buffalo that all grew up around the Erie Canal. The canal opened the Midwest (then the frontier) to settlers, who then sent farm products back to the cities along the canal and all the way to New York City. The canals spawned industries like lumber mills, iron works, cement works, textile mills and many others that took advantage of water power (everything was run with water wheels) and cheap freight costs to buy and transport raw goods, and then ship finished products to New York City. These goods were then shipped to other major cities in the east (remember how close Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC are to NYC) and New York City became the largest port in the US. I imagine that I studied the history of this area in a high school US History class, but it is so much more interesting and understandable to actually be on the canal going through these cities. It all really comes to life and fills us with wonder and awe as to the importance of this area (some of us are more filled with ice cream).

Here we go!

The locks in this flight are so close together that we stair-stepped up quite quickly and were soon at our stopping point - Blain’s Bay in Cohoes, outside of Albany.