This morning we woke up had breakfast and decided to head up to the state’s largest farmers market in Troy. They were not kidding the market was huge and even sorted by street and vendor. Clothing/neckless/cute stuff vendors were all on one road. Hot food was all in the center within a traffic circle area, fresh produce was on a different street, and fresh made items like bread, honey, peanut butter were all on yet another street. It took at least two hours to walk the market. I am generally terrible at these things as when I find something unique food wise I always want to try it. We did pretty well limiting our purchase's to fresh bread, home made brownie peanut butter, some fruit, and fresh pesto. Amy had a fresh desert crape and I found the special cake that was supposed to change my life (per last nights ice cream guy). The cake was a lot like pineapple upside down cake but with 3-4 kinds of alcohol in it. Strangely it didn't taste like alcohol but you did need to be over 21 to buy it. Unfortunately while it was good, it was not something I would get again or even recommend to anyone else. Guess the guy at the ice cream stores good taste buds were limited to frozen concoctions.
It was about noon before we pushed off the dock and headed into the first set of locks. Per the guidebook all the locks were at least 150ft long and 45ft wide. It seems some are only 40ft. The 40ft locks felt really small our first few days with our boat being 26ft wide plus about 2ft of fenders hanging over it felt quite tight driving into them. The first few locks had long cables hanging down that are attached at both the top and bottom of the wall. This made it quite easy to put a line though and attach to back on the boat. When going up in the lock I could occasionally put the starboard engine into gear and the boat would pull the line and snug right up to the wall. Then we got to the next five locks which are creatively called the flight of five. These have ropes hanging from the top. Some of the ropes are longer then others which meant sometimes we could get one around a cleat then pull it tight as the boat rose in the lock. Other times we had to hold the line until the boat came up enough to get it around a cleat which generally meant the boat would float over to the other side of the lock. For this trip we only had five fenders. All of them were about 3.5ft long and 18 inches wide (quite big). Because they were inflatable I had thought fender boards might be a good way to protect them against the walls as I was worried they might snag something and pop. Using fender boards meant that you needed two fenders for each fender board and that our set up would be quite time consuming to move from one side of the boat to the other and that all our fenders would be on one side. Meaning if we drifted over there was nothing to keep that side of the boat from rubbing the concrete wall.
The first two locks in the flight of five went ok. The dock lines were long enough to get on a cleat. The next two were challenging but we did ok. Lock five went pretty well. We were feeling good and thought we had a system in place. Of course that's when everything falls apart. With our past boats they were light enough we could pull them over or if they drifted out it was not a big deal as they were no where near the other wall. We quickly found out that we were no match for the weight of this boat especially when we had to work against the wind and water flow. We drifted over almost rubbing the wall. The next lock we did drift over and hit the wall leaving a little bit of gel coat behind from our rear sponson as we could not keep the lines tight enough on the cleats. After those two the next couple of locks went pretty well.
We ended the day after lock 15 as lock 16 had limited hours only opening every two hours for traffic. We pulled into the St. Johnsonville Marina and Camp Ground for the night. I'm pretty sure we stayed here during our first trip through the canal 16yrs ago. I still recall the marina convincing us to head to a local Italian restaurant and packed eight of us into an old 80's Cadillac they were using as a curtesy car. Anyway.. Once we were tied up some ladies came over to check out our boat. Amy gave them tours while I paid. It seemed they had their campers here and had seen us on the water while exploring in their pontoon boat. After making some dinner we headed over to their campsite for dessert and made some new friends. They all had their big dogs with them and it was nice to be around their furry four legged children while hearing about their adventures and sharing the campfire for the night.
We ended the day after lock 15 as lock 16 had limited hours only opening every two hours for traffic. We pulled into the St. Johnsonville Marina and Camp Ground for the night. I'm pretty sure we stayed here during our first trip through the canal 16yrs ago. I still recall the marina convincing us to head to a local Italian restaurant and packed eight of us into an old 80's Cadillac they were using as a curtesy car. Anyway.. Once we were tied up some ladies came over to check out our boat. Amy gave them tours while I paid. It seemed they had their campers here and had seen us on the water while exploring in their pontoon boat. After making some dinner we headed over to their campsite for dessert and made some new friends. They all had their big dogs with them and it was nice to be around their furry four legged children while hearing about their adventures and sharing the campfire for the night.
