Day 103 Thursday, October 3-Moving on....

Day 103 Thursday, October 3

Morning mist in Little Falls our boat with solar panel

Well we wake up anxious to get moving, but we are fogged in.  No one is going anywhere for awhile.  By the time the fog is lifted it is 9:00 and we are told that the locks won’t let us through yet as they don’t have room to tie us to a wall downstream until all the boats start on their way.  Lock 14 and 13 are to open at noon which is about a 3 hour motorboat ride away so we are anxious to get going.  Finally at 10 we are told they will move us through lock 17.  This is the largest drop of all the locks in the canal; one of the biggest in the world.  It takes only 20 minutes for the 5 boats to get secured and soon we are being lowered.  All goes well.  We get wet exiting the lock as this lock also has a lift door that drips as you exit vs. the typical doors on the locks.  This is due to the height of the wall of water being held back.  We are told to tie up and wait for instructions to move along.

 

Mike from Amicus

 

View from inside lock 17-one of largest drops in the world

We opted to keep going as there was a current which makes docking more difficult and there is lots of debris in the canals so we just mosey along at 6000 rpms and about 3.5 miles an hour.  After an hour our colleagues have caught up with us as they have been told it is okay to move on, so we put the pedal to the metal and increase our speed to 6 knots an hours.  Another hour we are tying up at lock 16 where we will wait a couple of hours before being allowed to move on.  It is a beautiful day and everyone is in good spirits.  Julie passes the time doing her Rosetta stone French, while Dawson networks; more boaters to meet and stories to share.

Finally at about 4:30 we are told we can move on and only about 5 boats decide to enter the locks.  The rest have decided to stay at lock 16 for the night.  We are the only boat of our group except for Lucie and John who tie up at the bottom  of lock 16 so we continue on with the 4 other boats.  One of the other boats is a Gozzard 37 which is a beautiful boat, and a Beneteau 50, followed by a Japanese owned catarmaran that is circumnavigating the world.  We figure we have about 2.5 hours of daylight.  We make it through to the top of lock 14.  This is shy of where we thought we would be however better than staying at lock 16.  Sunset is 6:38 p.m. and it is getting dark quick as we see the lights of lock 16, there does not seem to be much room to tie up at the wall.  The 50 foot Beneteau looks like he is pulling into the last large spot.  After about 10 minutes he leaves and the 37 foot Gozzard approaches the spot.  They radio us that there is room for us too so we circle around to give them time to park and start our approach.   They catch our lines along with Scott who is a worker from lock 16.  What a relief as is now dark.  Turns out the Beneteau touched bottom so went into the lock and the lockkeeper said they could stay overnight in the lock along with the Japanese catamaran so everyone is taken care of.



Failed infrastructure-bridge to nowhere

We say hello to Worth off the 72 foot monster power boat we have befriended along the way and head into town for dinner with Gwen and Guiomme for a bite to eat.  This is the town of Carjahonie and it is small and somewhat historic looking.  We find a real dive after about a 30 minute walk and get some sustenance then home to bed.  We will not get a great sleep as the wall is right beside 3 sets of train tracks and a level crossing so they toot their horns everytime they go by and there is about a train every 45 minutes.

Cheers Julie and Dawson