Used Pontoon Boats - Pontoon Boat Trip on the Erie Canal
Hi gang, Rick Ostler here from North American Waterway bringing you Used Pontoon Boats along with news and views from the boating industry. Here is an article on a recent pontoon boat trip on the Erie Canal.
Used Pontoon Boats - Pontoon Boat Trip on the Erie Canal
The Erie Canal is very beautiful these days. It used to be used mainly for commerce– transporting things from New York City to Buffalo and westward, but now, with the advent of highways and airplanes, the canal is used for pleasure boating.
The other day we enjoyed a day long cruise on the canal. We started out near Buffalo and went to Gasport. The highlight of the trip was going through the locks at Lockport. It is like entering a post-apocalyptic chamber, where you’re a tiny boat and there are massive 40 foot walls surrounding you. The huge doors in front of you and in back of you close, and then water rushes in (or out) so you and your boat go from the bottom this bizarre bathtub to the top– land’s edge, or vice versa, where you go sink 25 feet or so and then go onto yet another similar lock right after that. It was fascinating, like seeing the movie Waterworld come to life.
The canal’s speed limit is 5 to 10 MPH but unfortunately some of the bigger boats decided to go much faster than that, and in parts the walls of the canal are solid rock, which means boats’ wake has no where to fizzle out and we were following some of these crazy boaters with 5 foot waves threatening to make a mess of our pontoon boat as we’re in between two massive rock walls with no way out of that. The funny thing to me is we’ve been on the river and lake with our pontoon boat in all sorts of weather and waves and of all places to have “problems,” you wouldn’t expect it to be on the canal! But, when boaters don’t obey the rules, bad things can and do happen, and these boat owners who go 25 MPH on the canal should know better and/or be jailed 
I can laugh now because we weren’t hurt and survived, but if enough people break the rules, sooner or later some boat and/or boaters will pay the price, possibly even with their lives.
Parts of the canal are very scenic, with a bike path alongside, or a corn field, or lift bridges. The area around Lockport, New York is particularly picturesque. Normally, I don’t think of Lockport as a pretty place because I usually just see the strip plazas and car dealers along the main drag. Seeing a new section of Lockport from the canal though was a whole ‘nother perspective– the town actually looked artistic rather than blandly suburban.
The weather has been so nice that it looks like we will be boating again on the canal this week and going further east this time around, through Middleport onto Medina. Should be good! Thanks to Chris Pearson,The Erie Canal « What’s the 411?
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