August 23: The weather looked promising this morning for our crossing to Oswego a distance of 40 miles or so. The wind was on our stern so we did have a bit of a rock and roll trip but not too bad.
We crossed Oswego harbor and headed into the first lock of the Oswego Canal. The Oswego Canal is 24 miles long and has 7 locks. It connects to the Erie Canal and supports 8 hydro electric plants.
After locking through the first lock, we noticed that the first railway bridge looked too low for us clear. The vertical controlling height is supposed to be 20 feet but the Captain concluded that we could not make it under this bridge. So we had to dock quickly at a very rough wall and proceed to lower our mast. Not a simple task but a necessary one if we did not want to demolish our radar and GPS systems.
Lowering the mast allows us to obtain a vertical clearance of 15 feet which was plenty to clear the bridge. We were unprepared for this low clearance as we made it through all the bridges on the Oswego and Erie Canals on our last trip. We concluded that the water levels must be higher than normal right now. We docked just below the next lock for the night.
August 24-27: Winter Harbor: Confident that we would not have any more low bridge clearances, we proceeded to lock through the remaining locks on the Oswego Canal and entered the Erie Canal at the Three Rivers Junction.
After one more lock, we tied up at the fuel dock at Winter Harbor and were pleased to find that diesel was only $3.70 a gallon. A huge relief after the high prices of fuel in Canada.
We stayed at Winter Harbor last time and plan to stay here a few nights to provision, do laundry and see if we can get our shift gear cable fixed.
No comments:
Post a Comment