Little Falls NY (2013-10-03)

N43° 02.043', W74° 51.963'

 Tonight we find ourselves tied up to the wall at the Little Falls Harbour Marina in Little Falls NY.  While we did have access to an open wifi access point at our last stop, it was very spotty, so I wasn't able to make a blog post.


We left Phoenix NY at 0800 on Monday, in the company of two other trawlers.  John and Maedell, aboard M/V Sluggo, were only going as far as Brewerton, where they were going to be storing their boat for the winter.  Stephen and Mary, aboard M/V Liberty Blue, were also going all the way through the Erie, so we decided that we'd travel together.

The convoy leaving Phoenix NY

We said goodbye to John and Maedell at Winter Harbour Marina in Brewerton, and then went to Ess Kay Boatyard to fuel up both boats.  Their diesel prices were $3.96/gallon (about $1.05/litre), so at that price we decided to fill our tanks.  We had taken on 200 litres in Trenton, and it took another 455 litres to fill the tanks.  This may sound like a lot (well, yeah, I guess it really is :-)) but factor in that this is the first fuel we've put in so far this year.  Tonight before I started this post I did a quick fuel burn calculation.  That's 173 gallons (US), and at an hour count of 120.9 hours, so that works out to a fuel burn of 1.43 gallons per hour.  This is in line with the fuel burn that we saw from last season, so I'm pretty happy with these numbers.

After both boats had their turn at the fuel dock we headed out onto Oneida Lake.  We had read many warnings about this lake, so we were a little anxious about what the conditions would be.  We had a light wind, but it was from the east, so I was a little worried about the lake, but it ended up not being too bad.  We had a bit of a chop on the western end of the lake, but was almost calm and flat by the time we got to the eastern shore.

Oneida in a fairly good mood

 We travelled late into the afternoon, and stopped by 1700 at lock E-20 near Utica.  A long day's travel, putting 57 miles under the keel, but it staged us well for the opening of lock E-13 on Friday.

What we had planned on doing was heading out on Friday and push through to about lock E-17 or E-16, trying to follow behind the mass of boats waiting near the closure, but careful to not overtake them.  This would put us in a good position to get through the closure area on Saturday.  We then received a notice from the Canal Corp that they would be opening the closed locks a day early, around noon on Thursday.  Discussing the situation with Mary and Stephen on M/V Liberty Blue, we made a group decision to start our move on Thursday instead.  We were going to keep trying to check ahead of us, trying to figure out where the 'herd' was, stopping before we caught up to them. This ended up working pretty well.  As we reached each lock we found that most of the boats that had been there had already left.

Leaving lock E-20

We reached lock E-18 at around lunch time and found out from the lockmaster there that the herd was just ahead of us, bunged up at lock E-17.  He told us to tie up in the lock chamber, have lunch, and he would lock us through at about 1300.

Well, that plan changed about 15 minutes later when from around the bend above lock E-18 appeared two old LSTs!  I'm not sure what their story was, but they wanted to lock through, so our lunch was going to be cut short.

Love the travel trailer in the landing craft...

After locking through with the two LSTs and a sailboat that was with us at lock E-20, we tied up to the lower wall of lock E-18 to finish our lunches and to figure out what to do next.  We took a look on the charts at the river ahead of us and found that there was a town marina, the Little Falls Harbour Marina, just before lock E-17.  Once a quick check on Active Captain revealed that their normal rate was $1/foot we all quickly decided that a marina for the night would be a nice treat.  We continued down the river to Little Falls, and found that there was lots of room at the marina for us, so we pulled in and tied up.  Imagine our surprise when we found out that they were only charging $15 for the night, because of the issues with the Canal.  I figure it was their 'our canal is all messed up' special rate. :-)

M/V September Dream at Little Falls Harbour Marina

After getting settled in and getting the boat sorted, we decided to go out for dinner, and were joined by another couple that had been with us at lock E-20.  The six of us accepted a ride from the harbour master to the Piccolo Cafe, where we had a very nice dinner.

Tomorrow we're looking at continuing on down the river, trying to stay with the same plan of staying behind the herd, as we had today.  With any luck we'll get through the closure area tomorrow without any problems.