Skip to main content

017-Locking



It can be intimidating going into a big chamber, with huge steel doors being shut behind, looking up a 60ft wall or the doors in front of you that hold back the water above, and then hearing the deep noises of gates groaning and values opening around you.  You’re clearly not in charge as the water swirls catching the keel and shoving your 10ton boat around like it were a cork.  The movement of water is really amazing, to go up 20 feet only takes 5 minutes.  The power exhibited is awesome but then I’ve always loved water projects.

The challenge to locking is staying put like we all expect to do when we take a place on a wall or a pier.  All you’re given to do the task is a rope attached to the top of the wall.  Pulling it does little to hold you like you’re accustomed.  The boat is only loosely held in a position and in many instances, you’re pushing off the wall more than your trying to hold your relative position.  Some boaters don’t worry too much about where they are, they just stand there waiting for the last seconds to avoid a collision since you tend to be shoved back as much as you’re shoved forward.  But with a keel, like on sailboats, we get knocked around a lot more than the power boats do.  Coming from the Chesapeake Bay I rarely experienced currents.  Up here, I experience them all the time and am learning that it is the most important factor in determining your boats heading.  Even a small current will overcome large wind.

There’s been more than one lock that didn’t instill confidence in its integrity on the upside gates.  Water gushing out the seams into the empty chamber like a water canon is cool looking but not reassuring.  One time it was blowing out the concrete of the sill – now that was a problem.

Comments

  1. art3July 25, 2019 at 10:31 AM

    I learned something: sailboat keels make it harder to transit a lock

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

046 - Fog Bank a Comin

To all those who insist on paper charts as a backup to electronics, “what good are they in fog?”  What was a surprise to us was the frequency of fog on the lakes, it wasn’t anticipated by us, seemed like a New England issue not a lake issue.  But the water is cold (60s in the big water) and the air is warm which is perfect for dense fog.  We learned at the shipwreck museum that a large percentage of ship wrecks on the Great Lakes are ships driving into other ships, mostly in dense fog.  Radar, GPS, electronics charts and AIS should mostly preclude this cause of shipwrecks.  We expected the number one cause for shipwrecks to be bad weather (think Edmond Fitgerald) but bad weather only accounted for ¼ of so of great lakes shipwrecks.  With far better forecasting today, this too shouldn’t be an issue like it used to be.  But back to our story, without radar, we played our fog horn, set a watch on the bow, watched the AIS for ships (we could see them ...
Post a Comment
Read more

034 - USS Niagara

What a beautiful working replica of this historic ship.  It is used today as a training ship and offers 10day expeditions for youth to learn the ways of sailing a Brigg.  It is about as exact as you can expect.  I loved their use manila rope, linseed oil, and other items that gives it the smell of an old ship – I don’t know what it is but it’s very familiar.  Below decks were tight, it only had a 5ft ceiling in the galley area – how anyone could operate in that space long term was beyond me but the professional crew does. Galley stove and 5ft ceiling - how do they do it? Watching it sail was like stepping back it time.  It passed us on the breakwater silently, tall, and majestic.  It was easy to imagine the awe seeing this come into an isolated harbor like Presque Island 200 years ago.  Something so big and complicated carrying so many men and cannon would change the balance of power with its arrival.  It would intimidate the st...
Post a Comment
Read more

033 - Presque Island Is A Beautiful Oddity

Most the shore of Lake Erie is a long straight beach.  But jutting out is a very large peninsula that loops back on itself creating a bay.  They say it’s formed by glaciers but this isn’t obvious to the casual observer.  For starters, I don’t see how a glacier can flow if it doesn’t have a mountain to slide down and there is nothing to the North I’d call a mountain worthy of the lake depth gouge.  Call me a geo skeptic, but some of the stories they tell sound more like conjecture than science. Behind the beach is a steep hill that drops to a valley and then a significant mountain behind it so it generally looks like it was formed by a really big dozier.  So why this odd shaped bay jutting out into the lake?  And the bay it creates is very deep and the channel small, what glacier movement did this?  No matter how it was formed, the place is important to American history and is very beautiful and home to a great hot dog stand, “Sara’s.” Lake E...
Post a Comment
Read more