Sunday 10th June
A quick cab ride to Chelsea Pier, where we embarked
aboard Grande Caribe for the cruise to Chicago and the continuation of our
Great Loop adventure of 6 years ago. Shortly after embarking, we found Dennis
and Kathy (who had boarded yesterday) and, since Grande Caribe is a “Bring your
own grog” ship, Dennis and I went off foraging for beer. This we found at a CVS
Pharmacy about 15 minute’s walk away – we also tried a guitar shop to see if
they had a real cheap guitar I could use
on the cruise and ditch afterwards – but nothing was available, so there went
that idea.
The cruise got underway at 4.30pm and stared by going
downstream to the statue of liberty, before turning back up the Hudson. We got
better views of the landmarks from the boat, as in the city there are just too
many tall buildings to see the tall buildings! Even something as large as the
Aircraft Carrier “Intrepid” was hard to pick out from amongst them.
This is pier 60 that the cruise started from – the
structure behind the superyacht (named “Kisses”) is a golf driving range!
There was a “Welcome aboard” cocktail party with hors d’ouvres
that night and we stopped overnight at a
small park area called Bear Mountain.
Monday 11th
From Bear mountain, the first stop was a short distance
to Westpoint Military Academy, where some passengers were ferried ashore, as
the ship was not allowed to dock there – being an operational facility. The
river is around 150ft deep at Westpoint so we didn’t anchor and instead stooged
around for the 3 hours or so that the passengers were ashore. While doing so, we got our first sighting of
Loopers – in this case they were easy to identify by the lack of mast on the
sailboat, and the AGLCA pennant. We have seen a bunch more since, both on the
water, at locks, and stopped at marinas on the riverbanks..
Westpoint has a large sporting complex and is renowned
for having a good rugby team (rugby is considered a good discipline-building
sport for the military) and you can see the emphasis on this quite clearly on
one of the buildings
The Hudson is kinda big and therefore big ships are quite
common. This one passed us by and looked a lot closer in the flesh than it does
in the pic.
The stop for the might was in Kingston (not the one in Jamaica) and we tied up alongside
a cutsie museum, where we had free entry. Lots of model boats that I got plenty
of pix of for John two dogs, and other interesting facts…such as where the
Chipmunk gets its name. For those of you that don’t know this remarkable fact,
it is derived from the Lanape indian word “Chitamun”, which means: “he who
comes down a tree headfirst”. So add that to your store of useless information
(or pub quiz questions)!
Tuesday 13th
We were all woken by the grinding of the bow thruster
(yes it IS noisy) at 5.30am as we got off to an early start to get to Troy and
our first lock to enter the Erie canal system. In order for the Grande Caribe
to use the canal and get under the fixed bridges, it is necessary to clear off
the upper deck and lower the pilothouse so the bridge clearance is 18 ½ feet
(which is actually LOWER than Loopy Kiwi at 19 ½ feet)
 |
| I did ask them to pay me the $300 dockage fee, but they wouldn't cough up! |
This was the lowest bridge we went under at 19ft, and I
have video showing just how close we were, and shortly after we went into the
lock immediately in front of it, a couple of trains went over and their weight
drops the bridge by another 4 -6 inches!
After 11 locks, we stopped for the night alongside lock
11 at Amsterdam, NY (not Holland).
Wednesday 14th
Another early start and another 11 locks to Sylvan Beach
on the edge of Lake Onieda, New York. A lot of the canal to here is man-made
alongside the Mohawk river and is straight, narrow, shallow, and pretty boring.
We arrived at Sylva beach, a popular summer resort in New York state, at 8.00pm
and found it was closed.
Thursday 15th
Yet another early start across Lake Onieda, through one last
lock on the Erie canal, before turning right into the Oswego canal where there
are 7 more locks to Lake Ontario. Interestingly, they are numbered 1 through 8,
but during the building they found they only needed 7, so they just left out
number 4, rather that redo the drawings. The sky had clouded over and the wind
had got up, so it was a cool trip to Lake Ontario. WE arrived at 2.00pm and
were provided a shuttle service to the local liquor store, laundromat, and
WALMART!!! while the crew put the wheelhouse back up and reassembles the rest
of the ship.
Wifi on the boat is dodgey at best so I’ll try getting
this off today – but who know how well it may work.
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