Saturday, June 17, 2000

After gathering up all our duffel including picking up our son Greg at the Syracuse airport, we were off on Onondaga on its first New York charter of the season and our second canal boating adventure.

Onondaga had spent the winter in Florida as part of Mid-Lakes Navigation's migratory fleet. It had recently had its engine rebuilt, and we were the first to use it after the rebuild.

We were somewhat delayed by some last minute repairs to replace a broken window.

Since we had chartered Oneida, Onondaga's twin last summer, Libby gave us an abbreviated checkout. We were underway on our own from Cold Spring Harbor around 1600.

Onondaga was equipped with a compass, depth sounder, air conditioner, and auxiliary heater, items that weren't on Oneida last year.

The weather was good this day with warm temperatures. We had planned to go farther west this day, but given the time - we cleared lock 24 at 1730 - we decided to stay at Baldwinsville. In retrospect, this was a good move based on the next day's events.

Two fleet members exiting lock 24 nearing the end of their checkout cruise.

The guillotine-looking structure is a guard gate at the west end of the lock.

The nearer boat is Oneida, the boat we chartered last year.

We traveled about 5 miles today through Erie lock 24.

The arrows don't really indicate bad steering; they're constrained to pointing north, south, east, or west. They show the dominant movement from the previous spot. A GPS we brought along logged our position every 4 minutes. The breadcrumb trail was overlaid onto DeLorme Street Atlas maps via some homegrown software which automatically generates the hourly signposts.

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