Please don’t make us leave (just yet)
It’s been almost 2 weeks since we left Kingston, ON and even though we haven’t traveled far each day, we have been on the move to a new location each day. We had purchased a 10-day canal pass and we took the entire 10 days to do the trip. Now in Waterford though, with no pass to worry about, we have decided to chill here for a couple of days, taking advantage of their free dockage, electricity, water, showers and Wi-Fi.
Waterford is quite a pretty little town.
Waterford is a cool little town, with all of the amenities close by. The grocery store even allows boaters to take their shopping carts back to the marina and leave them there, to be picked up at a later date by one of the store’s staff! The dock here says that we are permitted 48 hours free stay. The implication is that they will force you to leave after that period of time has lapsed. As we know there are some other boats here that have been here at least 3 days, we hope we can hide out here a bit longer too.
ZTC, tied to the dock, right in front of the Waterford Visitors Center.
Off for a jog. Going “around the block” takes a while when the Hudson River is running right through the middle of the block!
One of our tasks today is to visit a West Marine store (a 30-45 minute bus ride apparently) to purchase some paper charts for where we’re heading. We have digital charts for the areas, which are great for navigating while on route, but in our opinion, nothing beats paper charts for pre-planning.
One cool thing that has occurred during our stay here is we had the pleasure of meeting up last night with one of our newer blog readers. Alexei (who tells us he only just stumbled onto our blog a week or so ago) and his wife Ericka came to the marina last evening and took us out to an awesome restaurant. Alexei and Ericka are both fans of boats and hope to acquire a catamaran at some point in the future. Here is a link to Alexei’s blog which talks about, among other things, some of his sailing exploits.
I’m not sure how we managed to forget our camera last night. That thing is normally permanently attached to us. Alexei saved the day though with his new iPhone 4!
PS: Thanks again for the wine, Alexei and Ericka!
Hey, it was our pleasure. Thanks for the boat tour and the great company. Good times! 🙂
I love seeing all the cruising destinations up north… we’ve never gone north of Baltimore 🙂 Just southward and beyond. Enjoy the cool and take your time!
I don’t know Cindy… we are rushing down to see you guys. 😉
Now once again I have a tidbit for the information files, for which I have to thank you guys. In fact, I have two! 1. I didn’t know there was a pass system to pay for going through the canals, nor that there was a time limit. 2. I now know that it takes 2 weeks to go through in a cat! At least, in a cat as well handled as yours! But that leads to a question. What happens if you don’t get through in the alotted time? Do they make you go back and start over? Pay a fine? Tow you out of the canal and drop you someplace? Also, from your tone, it seems that there are passes of differing lengths. How did you decide on a ten day one? Do they count weekends as part of that time, or is it ten business days? OK, I’ll shut up now and let you answer! 🙂
Your choices for passes are:
2 day
10 day
Season
The 10 day costs twice as much as a 2 day, and the season pass costs twice as much as a 10 day. I assume they would just make you buy an additional pass. The pass number is a coded with your start date so they know when it expires. They ask you the number at just about every lock. We could have done the journey faster, but definitely not in 2 days!
Hello, Guys, Been following your blog a while!, are you heading to Carribean islands ultimately?
Hi Mark.
Yes, we are ultimately on our way to the Caribbean. This time next year we hope to be in Grenada.
“We have digital charts for the areas, which are great for navigating while on route, but in our opinion, nothing beats paper charts for pre-planning.”
Yep… at least until they can make a 3′ x 4′ sunlight-readable flat panel display at 300 DPI for $600 🙂 There’s nothing like seeing the next three days’ worth of charts spread out on the table, scale rule and dividers in hand, to make you feel like a Captain.
There is a good chance that I will eventually fit some form of chartplotter to my new boat, once it’s built… even so, I will continue to carry paper charts. Chartplotters are computers, after all: any software can have bugs, and any electronic hardware can fail unexpectedly. They’re great and convenient, but it’s nice to have good ol’ ink and paper as a plan B.
Looking at the NOAA S-57 charts from Waterford on down, it looks like a nice, easy run in a well-marked channel from there to NYC…. although I hear it can be a busy channel at times.
When does your mast go back up?
I think we’ll put our mast back up on Monday at Hop O Nose marina in the Catskill Creek. We borrowed our friend’s strip chart of the Hudson and used the photocopier here at the visitor center to duplicate it. I think that will be all we need.