Lock 12 opened at 8:00 this morning and I called the lock at 7:50. They said they would be ready in about 15 minutes. One of the other boats at the Whitehall Municipal Dock left just before us. We followed them into the lock.
The lock was a little slow and the woman operating the lock mentioned that they were hit by lightning about 2 weeks ago and the motherboard of the controls was fried. She was doing everything manually and that explained why she wanted us to enter the lock with only one door open. There was no wind so it was no big deal to put a 14′ wide boat thru a 23′ opening.
That was the last lock until we get to the Chambly Canal in Canada, North of Lake Champlain. Once we were out of the lock the charts were labeling the waterway Lake Champlain even though it was still a narrow river. The water was really high. The trees next to the normal shore were in the water and on some of the property you could see the low break walls were under water.
Lot of fishing boats out today, a lot more than we saw yesterday. Where the river was narrow we slowed for the boats, but as it started to widen out we were able to just keep on moving. After the Lock I asked the other boat, Errante, what speed they traveled at and he said 8 to 9 so I took the lead as I though 9 to 9.5 is where we would be without any current. He ended up staying with us for pretty close to our whole trip. He turned off about 5 miles short of our destination.
You can see from the pictures that we had little wind today and it is supposed to be light and variable for the next couple of days. that will be nice because Lake Champlain is a large body of water.
You can see the mountains in the pictures. The Adirondack Mountains are in New York and they are on the west side of Lake Champlain. The Green Mountains are in Vermont on the East side of the Lake. While the scenery is spectacular, I can see why the movement to make this the 6th Great Lake fell flat. It does not have the size of a Lake Michigan or Lake Huron. It does have some depths in the 200’s but for the most part it maybe 50′ to 100′ deep if that. The size is about 120 miles long, North-South and the width ranges form 1 to maybe 10 miles. You know I did not see an ocean going freighter all day.
Well we made it to Vermont in the boat. We are in Vermont tonight and probably tomorrow night. We can add one more State to our list.