We’ll always know our neighbors and pals, but they’ll know us as a little shorter. There are several bridges along the Erie Canal that would love to scrape off our new KVH antenna and our radar, but the guys at Coeymans foiled them by building a cradle and helping us drop Misty Pearl’s mast onto it.
Voila. Just like that we went from 27-feet tall to 16-feet tall. Misty Pearl is the Nate Cox—after the unfortunate incident with Dewey and the machete—of the Looping world. Heck, we probably could make it through Madison County.
Palanca Maputo is an asphalt/bitumin tanker sailing under the Marshall Island flag. Why a Marshall Island ship is hauling stuff to resurface roads in upstate New York remains a mystery. What isn’t a mystery is the size of these suckers. They take up the entire channel.
We didn’t have time to request a flyby this morning before we launched the drone, but doubt he even noticed us.
For our birthdays, we exchanged Hobie i11 kayaks. We drove up to a family-run outfit on Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains to buy them. Unfortunately we took no pictures, which is too bad. Lake George was filled to the shores with every manner of boating and water sport. Think the lake where Mrs. Smails christened the Flying Wasp. We’ll probably have photos of the kayaks at some point.
Although we use a variety of weather sources for forecasts, to some extent they all use data from the same weather bouys or other stations along the water. Usually these are sites maintained by NOAA or other reputable outfits. Up here, we actually are relying on information supplied by stations at “back of barn” and “in orchard.” No joke. Old Man Tompkins in coveralls is calibrating sensitive meteorological equipment—on which our safety depends—between milking the cows and eating whatever Yankees eat instead of biscuits and gravy. Not at all confidence-inspiring. But based on what he tells us, we’re leaving tomorrow for the Erie. (We know, we know. We don’t need any first-year law students reminding us that the Erie Canal is different than the Erie Railroad. However, it’s probably not even the same Tompkins.)
The Federal Lock at Troy—so named because New York stalled until the federal government paid for it—is the end of the tides on the Hudson. These tides are the reason most Loopers avoid Coeymans despite a water-front restaurant that attracts locals from as far as Albany. At high tide, we have about seven feet of water at the point we have to pass the end of our dock. Below that is pump-clogging silt. At low tide, it’s too shallow for us to get out. Dana’s tide references agree that if we leave between 8 and 9 in the morning, we should be fine. Assuming that without Eric in the marina dinghy we can avoid the fallen tree. We literally have to pass within two feet of it.
We’ll probably skip docking overnight in Waterford—at the Erie Canal entrance—since we spent three days at Coeymans.
However, Coeymans Landing was pretty cool all in all.
____________
*Which is the cliché title of every Looper’s blog post for the Erie Canal.