Almost hit the lottery today. We depart Port Dalhousie Yacht Club (DYC) this morning at 6:15 am, and headed over to the Welland Canal to pick up our line handler, Roger. The canal requires you to have 3 people on board when transiting the canal “up bound”, so we needed to pick up a third person to transit the canal.
Roger jumped on board at 6:40 and we were in the first lock at 6:45. We went into the lock with another pleasure boat that actually started with us from Staten Island. He has been following us the entire trip however, we have stayed at different marinas most nights since Staten Island.
Anyway, we flew through the first 7 locks. We came out of lock 7 at 10:00am and thought we had hit the lottery since the average time to complete the canal passage is 10 to 12 hours. Well, we completed 7 locks, but had just one problem… there are 8 locks to transit.
We got stuck behind a freighter at this point and he had to wait for “down bound” traffic to clear before he could proceed into lock 8. Then we had to wait for him to clear the lock and another boat down bound to come into lock 8 and go through before we could continue.
Long story short, we finally go into Lock 8 at 1:30pm and exited lock 8 at 2:00pm. We still did a lot better than we ever expected. When we got out onto Lake Erie at 2:15, the lake was dead flat calm. We passed a ton of ice just east of the canal exit, but we were clear the rest of the trip.
We dropped the throttles and cruised until we just about lost day light. We made it all the way to Mentor, OH. We covered 165 miles today, most of it from 2:15 to 8:00pm.
Daryl and I are getting along really well and we both are enjoying the trip. Here are a few more pictures from the trip.
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