Waterford was cool, but it was time to keep moving. It was time to start moving West!

The thing about the Erie Canal is that it has locks. A LOT of locks. It’s kind of a warm up for the Trent-Severn Waterway in Canada which has oodles and oodles of locks.

Our experience with locks on the inland rivers was that locks can play havoc on a float plan. They may be busy and you have to wait. They may have commercial traffic that takes priority and you have to wait. They may have a maintenance issue and you have to wait. In other words, you may have to wait. With all of the uncertainty of timing through locks, we decided to get up and get through the first opening at 0700 to give us plenty of time.

The beginning of the Erie Canal gets you right into the think of locking with five locks in a row. They call it a flight and once you start, you have to go through all of them. We spoke with a couple of our looper neighbors and they weren’t planning to leave that day, but we didn’t speak to every one. As we threw off our bowlines, a big catamaran was also pulling out. They made it to the lock first and we waited behind them.

As it turned out, we buddied up with that catamaran for the next three days. It was a brand new boat without a name yet. It had been built in France and delivered to Baltimore. Three guys were delivering it to Wisconsin. They were really nice and helped us dock a couple of times.

The Erie Canal locks also had a few new tricks for us to learn. Most of the locks on the inland rivers are managed by the Army Corps of Engineers and have floating bollards. We are pretty good at those. The Erie locks are run by the state and have ropes, pipes, and/or cables. The ropes are just that… ropes that hang down and you have to grab onto it and hold it. The pipes are metal pipes that you wrap a line around and the rope slides up and down. The cables are like the pipes, but they are steel cables coated in plastic. We learned to do them all.

The first five locks went fairly easily. We were behind the big cat all day. There is no point trying to race ahead once you are in a group because you’ll just bunch up at the locks again. They secured their boat in the lock. We secured ours. And we lifted to the next pool level. Easy enough. The rest of the cruise was easy. The canal in this part is mostly on the river with wide channels and easy sailing. We passed some other boats and followed the big cat.

After six or so hours, we started to think about where we wanted to stop for the day. We chose Amsterdam because they have a dock for $1 a foot with power (really nice after the $3+ a foot we saw on the East coast), a restaurant, and some stuff to do. I called ahead to reserve a spot and they didn’t seem concerned.

After we went through our 9th lock (NINTH LOCK) of the day and could see the empty dock in Amsterdam, the captain of the cat radioed us and said that they were pulling into Amsterdam for the night so we could go ahead and pass. We told them that we were too!

They tied up and then all three of them ran over to help pull our lines in. It was a bit windy and pushing us off the dock, so their help was wonderfully timely.

Once we were snug for the night and paid for the dock, we walked across the pedestrian bridge to get a couple of things from Ace Hardware. We returned to our boat, had dinner, and were serenaded for the evening by a really good local trio that was giving a concert in the park next to the dock.