At 4:51 pm we arrived at lock 19. We needed to be there by 4:45 pm to lock through and so via radio, the lockmaster said to wait for tomorrow. The river was so narrow there was no place to turn around and go turn around to go back to look for a place to anchor little lone an anchorage.  This made for the following famous to us image, on this blogs home page. That is a triple track rail bridge. The trains went by with high regularity, at great speed and extended the length.  Earplugs were a hot item that night.

One of the first nights that the bug count reached an unhappy level and Mark build more screens from the materials purchased at the Ace Hardware in Little Falls, NY. In the Aldi near Fall River, MA Stephanie had bought another of her small electric tennis rackets that is a bug zapper. Stephanie was active with her tennis racket from hell, reducing the but count on the inside of the cabin. We mean 20 minutes of bug zapping not two hits with a fly swatter. It became a tradition for Stephanie to whack the bugs and then Mark and Currie, as the early risers, to clean up the remains of the bugs every morning.

That evening, Mark with his strong truly artistic flair painted many dots on the lower windshield to reflect the sun. The pilothouse is great to keep the sun and ran off and stop us from UV backing but we needed to reflect even more sun. Mark tried using the spray and peel paints that people use on their cars to temporary change the colour. More on that late but it did work. He shot the paint through baking sheets, to get a nice pattern, We’d bought the baking sheets at the Dollar Store in Little Falls. I’ll leave out all the other repairs we did so as not to bore you. Suffice it to say that the main salon should not look like this.

Amazingly we were awake for the 7 am opening … or should say we had been awake for hours. For a rare time, a sailboat joined us in the lock. The sailboat “Escape Pod” draws (require more depth than Cherish) and kindly offered to go first and look high spots in the river bed. The river bed is relatively slow so the sailboat keel will just scruff whereas we would chip parts off our propellers.

Many more handsome canal maintenance boats plus serious canal cleaning work

Courtesy of Bing Maps