029 - Cheerio Erie O

The last few miles of the canal uses the Niagara River to make the connection with Lake Erie at the city of Buffalo NY. There is one last lock parallel the river that lifted us about 15ft, the fall of the river for the final 8-mile run. From the top of the lock there is a dike to separate us from the raging Niagara which was flowing at 12kts! We would have gone over the falls had we traveled the river. The dike didn’t look very substantial as shown in the picture but it worked.

How appropriate that General Mills has a plant in Buffalo that waffles the smell of fresh baked Cheerios. And how sweet to see the mast back where it belongs, yeah! What an amazing waterway full of history and surprise. So glad we did the full length, the best towns are west of the Oswego exit to Lake Ontario. It’s glory years have passed and it’s no longer commercial but it is a wonderful opportunity for those with a boat to explore some history and to dream of what it was like. Brian’s highlight was traces of the old canal, the locks and swimming in the lakes. Lucy loved the villages on the western end, the scenery of the eastern, and the battlefields. As for me, I marveled at the engineering and how it evolved, the dying towns and the people who live there, and the beauty of the Mohawk River. My imagination was charged with the thoughts of settlers and Indians making the best of the wilderness and why it was the British saw it as so important to holding the colonies.

Thank you New York and Fed’s for keeping this treasure alive, it was a privilege to be one of the few to experience it. Cheerio!

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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 ...

048 - Big Water

The Great Lakes are mislabeled, they are really inland seas. They are so big that one end can have very different weather than the other end or even the middle. Waves however don’t really care where they come from and can travel hundreds of miles, reflecting off hard coastlines. Shallow waters amplify the waves by making for a shorter period; this can create little waves that brings the boat to a complete stop as it goes up and down pounding against a wall of water. Similarly, one end of the lake may be experiencing 20+kts of wind and the other end could be in a dead calm with waves that originated from the other end. Makes it tough to know what the conditions are for your journey, so when its good take advantage of it, it will likely change.

049 - Currents

I admit the picture doesn’t show much, but this was 5.5kts underneath Peace Bridge near Port Huron. We were doing 1/2kt against the current. People on the shore were walking faster than us. It was impressive. I’m glad to be on Lake Huron where there are no currents. The lake does slosh around with wind but I can handle that, I really don’t want to fight 5.5kts of current again, it was taking the boat and tossing it all around like a cork. I was working the tiller harder than in a following sea. You can see a bit of an eddy in the lower right but you’ll have to trust me on this one. The dramatized blurry picture below shows the turbulence and terror of the experience. It also captures the Loch Huron monster in the middle left – it’s unexplained what that silver hump is. Yikes!

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