January/February '05
Ditch Crawl: Canal Travel Through New York

by Susan Peterson Gately

   Canal travel is great for liveaboards if you don’t mind being a “power boat.” You stay nice and level and never have to worry about hitting a wave bigger than 3 inches. And one of the best canals for pleasure boaters anywhere in North America is the one the snowbirds head south on each fall — the Old Erie in New York.
   There is nothing in America like the New York State Canal System, which includes the Erie. This fully functional 524-mile-long waterway is the Great Lakes escape route to southern waters for most boats fleeing those chilly northern breezes in fall. It connects Buffalo directly to Albany and can take you north via the Champlain Canal to the St. Lawrence River, the Thousand Islands and Quebec, or south to the wine country of the Finger Lakes.
   These narrow waters unite a unique mix of the cosmopolitan and parochial. The residents of sleepy upstate towns and villages can stroll along their canal-side sea walls and visit with saltwater cruisers from Germany and South Africa. Snowbirds traveling to or from the Caribbean visit with long-term cruisers with their trawlers doing “The Loop” up the East Coast through the Great Lakes and down the Mississsippi, while an occasional 100-foot megayacht steams by en route to Nassau or New York. You can leave Lake Erie and make it to tidewater in five days, or you can spend a whole summer here.
   On the canal, life’s pace slows. There’s time to visit and talk with other cruisers, lock tenders and people watching the boats go by. During our cruise to and from salt water, the canal also seemed a largely forgotten waterway. We frequently traveled for several hours along its calm, tree-lined waters without seeing another boat, and we were often the only boat in a lock. As we journeyed by water across New York at a leisurely pace, we became converts to the canalling lifestyle and admirers of waterway’s serene beauty even as we looked forward to our tidewater adventure.
   Canalling is not navigationally challenging, nor does it require a high degree of seamanship or masterful boat-handling — yet we did not find canal travel tedious. The gradual changes in the landscape as we moved from urban Albany and Schenectady into hills and forests and then into patchwork farm fields held our interest. At places such as Fonda or Little Falls the ridges and forested hills pressed close into the canal and were reminiscent of a small-scale version of the rugged Highlands along the Hudson near West Point. And at several spots ruins of cut limestone from previous versions of the canal seemed to suggest a past far older than their 1830s origins.
   The canal presently operates from early May to late October during daylight hours. Dates vary from year to year — check the Canal Corporation website at <www.canals.state.ny.us> for current information or call 1-800-4 CANAL 4 (422-6254). Between Albany and Oswego its vertical clearance runs 20 feet, while the west half of the canal allows heights of up to 15.5 feet. Canal depths run from 12 to 14 feet, and there are 24 locks in its east half between the Oswego River and Waterford and 11 locks in its western portion.
   Locking through, a process I had anticipated with anxiety, proved painless — soon we were old pros at it. The trick upon entering is to pick out a pair of ropes or, if possible, a cable, and settle in. Then use these to keep your boat parallel to and close to the lock wall. A good technique on the locks with fixed cables or pipes is to loop a line around these from an amidships cleat, if you have one, and snug it up tight. Arrange your fenders on either side to keep you parallel to the wall as you go up or down. Since the ropes can get slimy, experienced canallers often wear gloves. You’ll want at least three or four good- sized fenders. A few of the locks have rough and uneven walls that can swallow a fender, and on these walls you do need to be vigilant as you go up or down.
   New York collects a modest fee for use of the locks. The cost depends on boat size and duration of use. A season pass for our 32-foot sloop currently runs $75. You can buy the lock passes at many of the locks or from the New York State Canal Corporation. Many towns along the canal offer low-cost or free tie-ups, and there are plenty of marinas offering fuel, pump-outs and other services. (Some of the lakes in the canal system, including Champlain and Ontario, require zero discharge of waste). You can also tie-up for the night at a number of the locks.
   A good reference that we used religiously during our canal trips was Skipper Bob’s Erie Canal Guide, available from the author at <home.att.net/~SkipperBob>, or at the Waterford Visitors’ Center and at Oswego Marina. It contains information on docking, marinas, fuel and other services, as well as brief summaries of canal points of interest. There are also several good chart books with supplemental information on canal facilities available at marinas or from marine supply catalogues and from the Canal Corporation website. Many cruisers on the Erie take their bikes along. Much of the canal has a parallel towpath for bikes and hikers. A trip into town for supplies or laundry is an easy bicycle ride over the mostly flat terrain.
   There is much to see here, for the canal follows a historic and strategic east-west route. It breaches the north-south barrier of the Appalachian Mountains at Little Falls, one of the few such openings for westward travel and trade. Because of this passage along the Mohawk River, the trading post at Albany was established six years before Plymouth Rock was settled, and to this day, the Mohawk Valley remains a major transportation corridor. For many miles west of Albany, canal, rail and highway travel along together. It feels odd to glide along in your boat a few yards away from the busy thruway. Here you can exchange waves with friendly truckers, and you may get an occasional toot from a passing locomotive. But there are other areas where the canal passes through roadless woodlands and vast stretches of inland marsh that seem little changed since the 1700s. As we chugged along, we watched deer fade into the underbrush and herons and egrets wade the shallows and backwaters.
   When heading west you’ll enter the canal at Waterford to ascend the justly famous Flight of Five. This is one of the highest lifts in the world, at 169 feet, and this climb out of the broad Hudson River Valley was one of the first sections of the present-day canal to be built. It took 10 years to complete the five locks, and an interesting historical exhibit here describes the previous canal and the process of building the present one. The old canal ruins lie side by side with the present version. At the first lock on the Erie a series of plaques and signs gives a brief history of the flight and the junction of the two canals here, and three of the original locks lie next to Lock number 2. Although small compared to the 1917 cement-walled lock, their cut-limestone construction remains staunch and true after nearly two centuries. These old locks now help regulate water flow through the flight. You can still see the grooves worn into the stone of their tops by the dragging tow rope as well as the beautifully shaped, rounded cut blocks made to accommodate the lock doors and hinges.
   It takes about two hours to go through the flight, and there are no tie-ups or stopovers between these locks, so once you start you must finish. At the top of the flight there is a guard gate to protect the city below. In the event of an accident this gate would keep the waters of the Mohawk from pouring into Waterford as a roaring waterfall. The gate is usually closed, so when starting down you must call the lock tender to ask that it be opened. Tenders monitor channel 13.
   Waterford itself, long a canal town and busy terminal, has a spruced-up waterfront and a brand-new visitor’s center to attract cruisers. There is excellent provisioning here, with two big supermarkets on the east side of the Hudson. You can even dinghy over to one supermarket which has a floating dock to tie up to while you shop. Waterford also offers a number of hike-and-bike paths to explore, and we stayed there an extra day to do so.
Another visitor friendly canal city is that of Little Falls, home to Lock 17. At 40 feet, this has the highest single lift on the canal. A short distance west of here the city maintains a visitor’s tie-up with showers and shore power. It was a bit of hike into town for laundry and groceries, but a short bike ride. Little Falls has worked hard to make itself attractive to canal travelers. Good restaurants abound within a short hike of the eastern city tie-up, and one of the old stone mills along the Mohawk has been converted into a collection of art and antique shops that make for delightful browsing.
   West of Little Falls the canal leaves the Mohawk River, running for a time alongside it. At Rome you reach a “watershed,” and from there you descend into Oneida Lake. This lake is 20 miles long and three miles wide, and its shallow waters have a reputation for kicking up a nasty chop in a blow. When we crossed it in a brisk northeaster, we had three-footers pushing us along by the west end. After crossing the lake, you come to a proverbial fork in the road at the Three Rivers Junction, where you can either continue west across the state or follow the Oswego River 24 miles north to Lake Ontario. The western section of the canal largely consists of artificial line cut with fewer locks but plenty of drawbridges. I’ve never traveled it by boat, but from the bike path alongside, it looks inviting, with its frequent small towns and stopovers.
   The trip from Oswego to tidewater in Troy takes most sailboats about five days. You can do it in three if you push and are lucky with the locks — but for the high-speed set, note that the canal has a speed limit of 10 miles per hour. It’s a crime to hurry through here if you don’t have to.
   If you have a sailboat, you’ll have to get your mast up and down before traveling the canal. For those entering at Oswego, the city- operated marina has a gin pole just north of the canal entrance. On the Hudson River end several marinas offer the service, and the Castleton Boat Club has a do-it-yourself gin pole. We opted to pay the Riverview Marina crew slightly more than the Boat Club’s fee. They were prompt and efficient, and their sheltered location was far quieter than the open river at Castleton, which was subject to constant boat wakes.
   We spent 10 days on our canal voyage and enjoyed each one. At Troy, we entered another world — that of the Hudson River, with currents, tides, shipping and, marvelous to see, sailboats with their masts up. Our subsequent saltwater adventure also proved highly satisfactory, and we look forward to getting off Lake Ontario again. When we do, we’ll look forward to ditch crawling on the canal.
   There are a number of cruiser weblogs on the Internet that describe canal adventures. Prism One’s “Erie Canal Transit South” at <www.cruising.ca/erie> describes a 1998 voyage and includes good, detailed notes on the experience — she had a few misadventures along the way to add interest!