Waterford, down the Hudson, to Catskill, NY

September 20, 2016

Here's a pic of me with a big, life-sized ceramic mule at Waterford. Mules used to pull the barges along the Erie Canal in the olden days. This one has a whole bunch of information about Waterford painted on it.  I love seeing artistic pieces like this on our travels.

We weren't thrilled about Waterford. Kind of run down and dirty, but the people were nice, and we had a delicious seafood dinner last night with shrimp, scallops, and haddock at McGrievy's. 

We had a good night's sleep and breakfast at the dock, so we were ready to go. We left the dock around 9:00, entered the Hudson River, and turned south. Yahoo!  We had one more lock to go through at Troy, Lock 1, but we had to wait quite awhile for it to open for us because some large boats were having problems in the lock.  Finally, at 9:23 we got the green light.  We followed 'Silver Tales' into the lock. They were a couple in a power boat from Oriental, SC  with whom we had chatted in Waterford, and they had told us about the pipes in Lock 1 instead of ropes. Good to know!

This is the first time we've had to deal with tides. We had learned about them five years ago in BC, but haven't done much with them since. This'll be a test for us. Luckily, our chartplotter shows tide information, which is wonderful, and means we don't have to buy a paper tide table (except perhaps as a back up).

So far, the tide has been with us so our speed over ground (SOG) is about 1.5 knots faster than our boat speed. Woohoo, we are just speeding down the river at 8.2 knots SOG.

The Hudson River has some pretty sights.

Sadly, however, it has lots of debris--branches, cups, bottles and other garbage.  We have to watch that we don't hit some of the larger branches.

Here's a photo of the Hudson City Light, only about four miles from our destination today. It looks
like it's right in the middle of the channel, but it marks the end of a little island.

Today we were heading for the Hop-O-Nose Marina, in Catskill, NY where we will have our mast stepped (put back up).  However, when we got there, he told us to go to the Catskills Marina, across the creek, for the night and to take the boat to Hop-O-Nose Marina by 8:30 am tomorrow morning.  They are still working on another boat right now, and we are next.  By tomorrow, we hope to be ready to sail again. Yahoo!