Demasting Part 2, now a Canal Boat
30 July 2020 | Waterford Harbor Floating Dock, Waterford, NY
Mike
July 30, 2020 Thursday Waterford Harbor Floating Dock
Before eight we were up and had moved the boat to the slip where the ancient crane stood that the marina crew would use to take our mast down and then we went to look for the crew.
By eight-thirty we had the two marina workers and the owner at the boat ready to take down the mast. The owner shimmied up the mast and attached a new looking choker to the mast above the first spreaders and then he slid back down to the deck to supervise the lift. Except with some challenges getting the pin out of the headstay, the release of the stays went without trouble and soon they had the mast in the air using the ancient stiff leg derrick they had for a crane. The crane looked like it was bought used back in the thirties and while not filling me with confidence it did the job without difficulty. The owner did have to show one of the crew how to switch the drive to lower the boom but it was early in the morning after all.
We were going to stick around until they had lowered the mast but Sean the owner agreed to take care of a few items for me on the mast to protect it so we passed the crew a tip and they released our dock lines and we headed out onto the Hudson River with the mast still in the air. I should mention there were some reviews online reporting the marina had dropped their masts so those reviews would explain why we were a bit nervous but they did a great job.
We rode the tide up the Hudson River all the way to the first lock at Troy, New York. We had to keep reminding ourselves we had no mast and therefor no wind instrument, no horn, no radar, and we didn’t have to worry about bridge clearances anymore. We also found we were rocked a lot more by the wake of passing power boats.
This section of the river does not have the views of the mountains and is much narrower; we saw no commercial shipping and only a few power boats passed us. The amount of development is much less along the river front until you get to Albany which has a lot of commercial docks for ocean going ships and tugs. We stopped at the Albany Yacht Club for fuel, a pump out and ice which went very well. The fuel dock was getting very little business due to Covid so we didn’t feel any pressure to rush our stop as we often do on busy fuel docks.
The waterfront in Albany has a lot of potential for leisure focused development but like many cities in America they built a highway along the river with lots of overpasses that visually cut off the waterfront. The only public amenity on the waterfront we noticed was a boat ramp which seemed like a real shame for the seat of such a powerful state capital.
An hour beyond Albany we came to the first dam on the Hudson. After 150 miles we were still at sea level with the same five-foot tide as there was at the river mouth. Now we had to enter our first lock and finally get above sea level. The lock was a large massive structure and after a wait of fifteen minutes while they emptied the lock, we were instructed by radio to enter the opening gates. The lock master was very helpful and talkative and seemed glad to have a customer come along. We attached a line to a pipe that ran up and down the wall and prepared for our lift.
The gates closed with a tremendous boom as the last of the incoming tide pushed them shut and after a long pause the water started to fill the lock. We had prepared ourselves with gloves which we needed to push Monarch off the concrete walls as she tried to swing in the current. When the filling was complete and the exit gate started opening, I took the helm and motored out into the now calm river with no current to deal with. Dark storm clouds had been building for a while and we watched them carefully for signs of lightning.
We soon came to the intersection of the Hudson and the Mohawk River and we turned left in a rain shower and entered the Erie Canal, and after waiting for the rain to letup, we proceeded under the railroad bridge to the free dock in the town of Waterford. There were a dozen other boats tied on the floating dock as well as the concrete wall section. The town had done a nice job making it a pleasant park space.
The visitors center had a sign “closed until three-thirty” so we walked up and visited the series of four locks we would be taking to rise up to continue on the Erie Canal and we talked with one of the lock keepers. Lock one we had already done and was 15’ of rise, lock two through six were all together at Waterford and will raise us - Lock 2- 34’, 3-34’, 4-35’, 5-33’, and 6-33’ - to 184’ above sea level.
The visitors center opened back up but because the canal had been closed, they for some reason forgot to order the chart books for the canal that we wanted to guide us. Well we will just have to manage without a good set of charts and rely on our increasingly temperamental chart plotter. We paid a ten-dollar fee for electricity and for a key to the showers.