Rain, Rain, Rain...

Friday, July 31st. The motor ran smoothly yesterday... and today, for that matter. We stopped for the night last night between Locks 8 and 9. 25 miles and 7 locks today... of course, there is a flight of 5 locks... once you start through one, you're going through them all. We had the interesting experience of locking through 6 of those 7 locks with a couple of larger boats from Canada... I'm guessing that their skippers must have been only children, 'cause they didn't know how to share; they barely left us room to squeeze Wild Blue in at the very end. They had room up front. Not to denegrate our friends to the north, but these guys seemed to have trouble pulling their boats alongside the lock wall... if they could snag a line (ANY line), that's where they'd stop.

In my best friendly Texas twang, after that first lock, I politely asked on the radio, "Say, can you two big ol' Canadian boats going through Lock 6 give this little boat behind you enough room to tie off?" That was a 35' drop, and Wild Blue got a pretty good shower from the lock gates on that one.

Next lock, "OK, now I asked nice. If you boys could pull forward just a teensy bit, there'd be plenty of room for all of us."

They finally got the hint.



Oh, and it was pouring down rain... all day. I gave the Blonde the choice: stay a night in a marina here or move on to Waterford. What a trooper. She rode the bow through that whole flight and never missed a beat.

Well, it was a warm rain...


Fortunately, it was just rain; no wind and only an occasional rumble of thunder. I had radar on much of the day, as the visibility lowered then raised... didn't need it, it remained marginal VFR the whole day.

Joan jokingly said, "It'll probably stop raining when we get through that last lock." It did. We pulled up to the dock at Waterford and snagged the last spot... not really big enough for Wild Blue, but the Harbormaster said we're fine hanging over a bit on the front. And wouldn't you know it, the guy who was a pain in the butt through the locks drifted around, hitting the boat behind us... then the guy behind us pulled out, leaving a large hole. Yep, ol' pain-in-the-butt is our neighbor. I did give him a hand with lines as he came in (self-preservation on my part), but I took the only 30 amp plug-in between us. It's OK, he has 15 amp, so he's not going without.

We are down for a couple nights at Waterford. Shortly after we got tied off, the rain came back... good timing on our part.

Hopefully Mother Nature will cut us a little slack so we can wander around town without our rain gear. And it would be nice to dry out the stuff in the cockpit; plenty of rain came in while we had the sides open to transit the locks.

A couple other highlights of today's cruise: we saw about a dozen waterfalls of varying sizes...

Not sure if there are always waterfalls along here or if it's because of all the rain (storm drain overflows?).

And this very sweet gesture...
Joan carved our initials and a heart into the slime on one of the lock walls. What a romantic!


Sunny and warm forecast for tomorrow.