Friday, July 3, 2015
Westport, NY
A short two hour cruise up Lake Champlain brought us to Westport, NY on Monday, June 29. Here we stayed at an anchorage near Westport Marina. We had a nice dinner of leftovers on board.
The next morning we took the dinghy into town and spent a few hours exploring. This town is tiny but very pretty and well-maintained with beautiful older homes on the main and side streets.
We met a friendly realtor who has a home in Florida and she encouraged us to visit the local library. The library was in an historic stone building with a still functioning clock tower. The librarian invited us to climb the stairs to see the clock from the inside. She didn’t seem to have any qualms about sending people up an extremely narrow and steep staircase. It was fun! And the library was in a gorgeous setting overlooking the lake.
The town was getting ready to celebrate its bicentennial over July 4 so it was festooned with red, white and blue bunting (sorry no pix)! We walked along a rapid brook that wound through the downtown area and under one of the main streets. A walking path had been created that we could use to follow it as it flowed through the town.
We stopped at the ship’s store at the marina and Jonny bought himself a jacket he’s been wanting. Afterwards, we had lunch at the marina’s waterfront restaurant. That night I swear we saw what looked like a sampling of the northern lights!
Orwell, VT
Our first stop in beautiful Lake Champlain was Chipman’s Point Marina in Orwell, VT on Saturday, June 27. It was only a two hour cruise from Whitehall and our first time on Lake Champlain. What an amazingly beautiful body of water! It is a long (north/south) lake and the sixth largest body of water in the U.S. after the five great lakes. On the west is New York State and on the east is Vermont. As we go further up the lake we see the Adirondacks in the distance in the west and the Green Mountains in the east. Both appear to be bluish grey outlines of varying heights and distances against the horizon.
Chipman’s Point Marina had been recommended to us by fellow cruisers and it proved to be a great stop. It is located at a point on the eastern shore of the lake. Two four-story stone buildings from 1810 and 1812 prominently mark the point and are the marina’s office and ship store. During the colonial period, the buildings were used as storehouses for the commerce that occurred along the waterway. Chipman Point is owned by a mother-son team (Chip – no relation to the historic name of the point and his mother Pat). Interestingly, Pat grew up in the same town as Lynn (Fairfield, Conn.) so they had fun recalling what is was like to grow up there. More on Chip in a later blog….
In the afternoon, we took a walk to check out our surroundings. Just up the hill from the marina, we began to see the beautiful Vermont countryside and met a couple of these contented creatures.
That evening, we were invited for cocktails with fellow cruisers Floyd and Linda on Tumbleweed who had arrived earlier in the day. We met them at the Rendezvous and have seen them in passing at a couple of marinas. This was the first time we were really able to chat and get to know each other. They are from Wichita and this is their second time doing the Great Loop so they had lots to share with us and it was a very pleasant evening. When we returned to Zendo, we had a late but delicious dinner of one of Lynn’s new favorite recipes called Nona’s chicken and pasta with zucchini and anchovies – yum!
It rained the next day and Jonny had pulled out his back so we gave ourselves the day off and had a cozy day reading and relaxing. That night we watched The Last of the Mohegans which we had been wanting to see again since we are in the historical land of the Mohegans. When watching the closing credits we discovered that the movie was actually filmed in North Carolina!
One of the benefits of staying at Chipman Point Marina was the use of the courtesy car which we borrowed to go to Fort Ticonderoga the next day. The countryside in this part of Vermont is a classic rural landscape - just what you would picture with rolling hills, dairy farms with inviting farmhouses and lots of cows.
Fort Ticonderoga was just a short ferry ride across the lake on the New York side.
The grounds included beautiful flower and vegetable gardens that were planted by the Pell family who purchased the land that the fort was built on and build a hotel and home there. They were also instrumental in leading the entire effort to reconstruct the fort itself.
Touring the fort was fascinating. High school and college-aged kids were dressed in period costumes and going about the business of running a fort. They were making shoes in the cobbler’s shop, cooking pea soup over an open fire to feed the “troops”, providing musket demonstrations, etc. They were even required to sleep in the barracks on the mattresses made of matted straw! Each of them was enthusiastically portraying their role whiled educating the visitors on the history of the fort and their town. We were very impressed by the quality of the restoration especially since it was done through private donations.
When we returned to Chipman’s, it was time to leave for our next stop on the lake, Westport, NY.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Whitehall, NY
On the way to Whitehall, NY, we went thought the last series of locks on the Champlain Canal which connects the Hudson River with Lake Champlain. The last town on the canal is Whitehall, NY. When we arrived on the afternoon of June 26 after a seven hour cruise, we tied up to the free floating dock which is maintained by the town. It was located next to a display of the actual wreckage of the Ticonderoga. This seemed like a nice quiet place to spend the night and the price was right!
Whitehall has seen much better days. As with many of these towns on the river, it used to thrive when the waterway was a major transportation route. But it is now quite depressed with many closed businesses and a declining population. Even amidst this trend, the people we met were proud of their town’s history and wanted to make a good impression on visitors.
Whitehall has definitely had a place in American history. In addition to housing the Ticonderoga that fought in nearby Lake Champlain, it considers itself to be the home of the American Navy. Our first naval fleet was built here in preparation for the Battle of Valcour which took place on Lake Champlain. Benedict Arnold build this fleet and led the battle against the British. Although the Americans lost this battle, it caused the British to be delayed from moving south until the following spring. It’s interesting to learn of Benedict Arnold’s heroism and fame in so many references in this part of the country. We often remember him as a traitor but he was a very successful and respected patriot before he became disillusioned with the American cause and turned to “the dark side.”
So we thought we had found a good dockage until we woke up the next morning to find ourselves hard aground. The floating docks were no longer floating and neither were we! (See the before and after pictures below). Jonathan called the lockmaster to find out what happened as there are no tides and only minimal currents in this area. It turned out that the regular lockmaster had the previous day off and when he went to adjust the river height in anticipation of predicted rains, he lowered the water levels two feet instead of four inches! The “real” lockmaster apologized profusely and proceeded to raise the water levels. But of course, it took another five hours before we were floating and able to leave Whitehall. In the meantime, we had breakfast at a real nice restaurant in a converted bank and walked the town which extends on both sides of the river.
Instead of leaving at 9 as planned, we finally were able to leave by 1:00 and headed north to our first stop on Lake Champlain, Chipman Point Marina.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Lessons in Locking
In describing our adventures in locking, several people have asked to explain how locks work and what it’s like to go through locks, so here’s my attempt to describe the experience.
Locks were created to facilitate transportation of goods between bodies of water that are at different elevations. Before highways, waterways were the primary means of transporting goods from one place to another. Before locks, goods would have to be unloaded from a boat, moved onto horses or carts and carried overland to the next river where they would be reloaded onto other boats to reach their destination. Locks, along with the digging of canals between bodies of water, transformed the ability to carry on commerce before the invention of the railroads and the construction of highways.
The locks we are traveling on in this portion of our journey are primarily used by pleasure craft but were originally built for commercial use. On the major waterways such as the Mississippi, they are heavily used by commercial traffic as well. Here is a map of the locks that we’ll be traversing on the portion of our trip from the Hudson River through to Montreal.
Locks are essentially mechanical walls that hold water back and release water to allow boats to transition from one elevation to another. Locks are staffed by a lock master who a boater notifies when approaching a lock. On the NY canals there is a red traffic light indicating that the boater must wait until the lock is ready. You can lock up or lock down depending on whether the elevation you are moving towards is higher or lower. In either case, the lock master opens the large gates and directs boats to enter and tie up on either the port (left) or starboard (right) sides of the lock. Depending on the size of the lock or the number of boats waiting to lock through, the NY locks can hold between one and eight boats. On the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi Rivers the locks are much bigger and hold large barges as well.
The boater must have already placed several large fenders on the sides of the boat to prevent the boat from rubbing against the lock walls which are often rough, dirty and slimy.
When entering the lock, the boater must secure the boat to the lock wall either by grabbing a line (rope) that is hanging down the lock wall or hooking one of the boater’s lines around a vertical pole on the lock wall. The boater then holds those lines (not tying them) while the lock master closes the gate and floods the lock with water (if locking up). The NY locks are mechanical. The locks in Canada which we will pass through are turned by hand! As the lock floods with water, the boat rises higher and higher until it is even with the “higher ground.” Sometimes it can be a challenge to hold the boat steady against the lock wall especially if the water is flooding in and sloshing round. But usually, it goes pretty smoothly.
When the lock is full, the lockmaster opens the gate and directs the boaters to move out, one at a time.
When locking down, the same process occurs except that the lockmaster is releasing water from the lock and the boat and water levels drop until they are level with the lower side of the waterway.
The dangers associated with locking are not securing to the lock wall properly (either tying up to tightly or too loosely).
Lock tenders tend to be very friendly and helpful in providing information about the next lock. Sometimes one has to wait for the locks to open and circle around or tie up at a wall outside of the lock. Oftentimes, there are attractive parklands nearby and sometimes one can tie up at one of these dock walls overnight.
So far we have gone though about ten locks on the Hudson River and two in the Dismal Swamp. We’ll have more to go through as we enter the Chambly Canal in Canada. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that all continues to go smoothly!