June 1, 2012 - Rome, NY

I’ve got a mule, and her name is Sal, Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal. Low bridge, everybody down, low bridge for we’re comin’ to a town. And you’ll always know your neighbor, you’ll always know your pal, If you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal. (Thomas Allen, 1905.)

AT Waterford, New York we commence our transit of the Erie Canal. Part of the 801 mile New York Canal System (including connecting rivers and lakes), the Erie Canal was once heralded as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

The Canalway is now a National Heritage Corridor, with 57 locks ranging in lift from 6 to 40 ½ feet. Opened in 1825, the Erie transformed the wilderness of rural Upstate New York, lifting goods and passengers 570 vertical feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, in an irregular staircase of locks. Here’s Lock 7’s spillway, showing the volume of water that is routed around each lock.

Lock 7 takes us up as we head west. Until 1918, mule-drawn barges linked commerce from the Port of New York City with the Great Lakes; the canal now transports pleasure craft under their own power.

Passenger and freight trains are common along the banks. Just as the canal was, they were built on the area of least elevation.

Along the canal, concrete walls adjacent to the locks are available for free and convenient overnight docking. Just west of Lock 11, we tied up with four other boats, and enjoyed a beautiful sunset, a rare event in weeks of rainy days.

The canal and river valleys are fertile for farming. This farm shares its land with the railroad.

This sign is not for canal travelers, but is evidence that an expressway is nearby!

The weeks of rainy weather have caused the canal levels to rise. Combined with some repairs to Lock 13’s spillway, this made for turbulent conditions on approach.

So turbulent that Solitude, a trawler we had been traveling with, had an unfortunate encounter with the lock wall, damaging her side. Monarch herself, forewarned by the lock tender, made our entrance safely after getting up scarily close to the lock’s bullnose abutment.

The navigational marks along the Erie are removed during the winter. Now we see how they know where to put them next season!

The Guillotine Lock at Little Falls, at 40 ½ feet, is the highest lift lock on the Erie. It is one of only two locks in North America where the entrance gate is lifted above the boater, with the canal water dripping down our necks as we passed under the gate.

Inside, we were shut out from the world.

And at the mercy of this lockmaster.

The 40-foot rapids and waterfalls, which once impeded navigation, were smoothed out by the lock and canal, which opened Little Falls for commerce in 1793.

We stopped just west of the lock at Little Falls, a quaint village with a lovely canal-side municipal marina in its historic canal building.

Next day, we were to see all sizes of boats. This itty-bitty one is an official canal workboat, which had a locking all by itself.

This one is about the same size.

And this one’s even smaller, probably 18 feet.

We saw just a few tour boats, this one with a class trip aboard.

Here’s a beautiful classic Pilgrim, out of Bay Harbor, Michigan. We watch her pass from our comfortable overnight berth at Rome, New York, where we donned foul-weather gear for burgers out at Coalyard Charlie’s Restaurant.