Past experience - our first boat vacation: The captain has been boating practically all his life as his father had a boat when the captain was a child. I, on he other hand, was just a boater wannabe. The captain and I bought our first boat in 1989. That one was a 28' Luhrs - mostly a day boat with a head, but it had a galley and a raised eating area (which I truly miss in our current boat) where the table dropped down into a cozy bed.
Up until 1993, we only used the boat as a day boat, but in August of that year, we decided we'd take a little vacation time and go up the Hudson River to see what we could see. At the time my older son was 9 and my younger son was almost 5 years old. Being the garrulous one that he is, the captain has a tendency to anyone he finds wandering around the marinas we stop at. At Newburgh he found a seasoned veteran of the Hudson River and asked him if there was anything worth going up river for. The answer was Lake Champlain and the Champlain canal.
Full of excitement, the captain decided that we should keep going and informed his crew that we would travel through the Troy Lock followed by 12 or so locks on the Champlain Canal. Considering the ages of the younger crew members, the planned activities, and the size of the boat, I had one thought that I said to myself "We'll either have a very good time, or we'll kill each other - nothing in between." Fortunately, it turned out to be the former and not the latter outcome as we all enjoyed the adventure.
I well remember my first encounter with a lock. We prepared our defense with fenders on both sides of the boat - a very good plan. With a line to attach to the side of the lock, a boat hook in hand, and my heart raising, I took my battle station at the bow. Being complete novices on locking, upon seeing the traffic light turn green, we entered the lock and attempted to pull up to the wall on the starboard side of the boat. I got a line attached to the wall and tried to hang on for all I was worth. After a bunch of communication with the captain, most of which was me saying, "I'm losing her", the captain told me to let go as he decided we should instead try to pull up on the port side.
As it turned out, the boat was quite content to be on the port side. I was able to leisurely hold the line to keep us close to the wall and poke at the wall with my boat hook regularly to keep us away from the wall. The difference was as night versus day. After I've been through a situation like that, I often wonder just how much of an entertainment factor we supplied to our fellow boaters, who by the way were comfortably resting on the port side - most likely enjoying the show or else praying we wouldn't crash into them in our frenzied state.
We stayed over night somewhere around there - maybe the Troy town dock. The Captain always remembers every detail. I'm writing this blog because I can never remember a thing about where we stayed later. The big news flash was that the next day we would have to be up and ready by 8:00 because we had the dozen or so locks to lock through on the Champlain canal. Being now an expert at locking, we were ready to tackle this head on. Everyone was assigned a task for locking through and as we got the green light on each lock, we all took our stations. Even the young guy, remember he was not quite 5, had a job to do. He was so cute with his boat hook holding it against the wall to keep the boat away. My older son helped with grabbing a line to help hold the boat in.
The locks in the Champlain Canal had lines already hanging ready to be grabbed and held so that boaters did not have to lasso something with their own lines. After our first experience with that, I went through the galley cupboards and came up with one Playtex glove per crew member. The lines get pretty slimy just hanging there with the water going up over them constantly. One thing I definitely learned from that experience is to always have gloves on board that can get wet and horrible!
I'm not sure why I remember the trip up the canal so vividly. Perhaps because it was such a novel experience, but when all was said and done it had taken us 12 hours to traverse all the locks and get into Lake Champlain. 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. what a day that was! Of course we were so busy that the time passed by quickly and some portion of that time was sitting idle waiting for the green light to tell us to go forward. All told from beginning to end, that boating trip was about 10 days long. We not only survived the experience but the Captain and I were from that point onwards totally hooked on boat travel.
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