Lock No. 11, here we come

The Schenectady Yacht Club sounds pretty grand—and it did provide a safe haven in the rain—but we nearly fell off the rickety dock more than once.  It’s tough to walk two wobbly dogs even on solid docks.  Narrow bouncy docks with broken slats just make it that much worse.

Even more worse, the Jim Jones of the bug world apparently selected Misty Pearl as the appropriate place for the mass suicide of his ten-million followers.  When we went outside this morning it looked like someone had painted the decks brown.   Gross.

Dana channeled her inner mythbusters while touring the area.  They say a rising tide lifts all boats.  Oh yeah?  We’re pretty certain that even a rising tide would not lift a boat with weeds growing through its hull.

The dockmaster sneered when we discussed possibly stopping tonight in Amsterdam because it would be only two hours of cruising.  Wrong.  Three locks and four hours later we tied up.  Along the way we slipped under the low bridges made famous by Thomas Allen’s song.  

We also passed the ruins of abandoned factories and mills.  They could make a fortune turning them into haunted houses.

The common wisdom is not to pilot “by video game.”  In other words, find the navigation aids visually and rely on them rather than the chart plotter.  Good idea.  The chart today showed us firmly on dry land.  We weren’t.

Having arrived in Amsterdam, we contemplated walking around the famed red-light district.  We really aren’t that kind of people, however, so instead we visited the Amsterdam Castle.

Dana found her knight in shining armor.  Fortunately for the family unit he can’t pilot a boat.

The dock is just a long wall with twelve boats along it.  Eleven of them are looping.

Doug shot some drone footage of Amsterdam but is too tired to edit it for a video.  Ten locks down—and the next one only is about 500 yards ahead of the dock—with some 200 left to go.