Day 25
Begin: Waterford
End: Scotia
Day 25 turned out to be a good day. We got up and headed into town where Leila got a coffee. Back aboard we called ahead to the lockmaster where he said it would be about 20 minutes. We at breakfast and we began the flight of locks.
The locks by now are pretty non-eventful. One nice thing about going up is when you are raised to the point where you can see over the lock wall. It feels like you are now in a new place and you check out the scenery. Other than that the process is quite trivial now with over 40 locks completed in the last few weeks.
Now on the Mohawk River we made good time on our way to Scotia. We arrived where there was a large Trawler taking up the whole dock, the dock is about 50′, and the trawler was about 40′. Not wanting to continue on I tried something new. I went upstream of the dock about 100 feet and dropped anchor. I then set it with the motor and let out enough rope so that the back of the boat was about 5 feet from the dock. The gentleman from the trawler had come out in the meantime to lend a hand and he tied the stern to the dock. He suggested using an ‘X’ pattern, which was a great idea that I would not have thought of.
Marina and Public Boat Launch in Scotia.
The ‘X’ pattern meant that I attached two ropes to my stern, one on the port cleat and one on the starboard cleat, and then cross them attaching to opposite dock cleats. This meant that the boat could be closer to the dock, while still being safe. It also prevented my stern from swinging towards the river and hitting the trawler’s bow pulpit with my mast, which stuck out a few feet.
We talked with the gentleman and his wife for a bit, and then headed into town. We wanted to go to Jumpin’ Jacks again, as well as do a geocache that was in the area. We first went to Jumpin’ Jacks for lunch, which was great again (stopped on the way up to Lake Champlain), and then went in search for the geocache. The geocache turned out to be much further than I had realized, as there were no connecting roads to the park and the road was lined with houses. My plan was just to go through the woods as I assumed there would be an entrance, but the road was house after house, and filled with ‘No Trespassing’ signs. We then took the loooooooong way around via road and found the cache. We were the second people to find it which was fun. We ran into someone local who said there was a trail that we could take back into town. It turned out to have ‘No Trespassing’ signs on it, but only from the other direction.
We stopped at a store and got some food and then meandered back to the boat, walking through the large park. Back aboard we decided to use the nice park and brought our portable grill to a picnic table and cooked dinner. I like this town, its very friendly and the docks are nearby everything. Its too bad the dock is not larger, and that the local motorboats did not speed by throwing a large wake all evening.
Back aboard we played some cards, watched a movie and headed to bed.