August 28th we got underway from Westport, NY as a ground fog burned off and headed south forty miles to the southern end of Lake Champlain at Whitehall. Whitehall is the location of the northern lock of the Champlain Canal which returns us to the Hudson River at Troy. Carol has been saying that summer doesn’t exist up here as the high temperatures have rarely been above seventy five degrees. As the picture above shows it is difficult to argue with her as this picture of autumn foliage was taken on August 28th.

August 29th we locked through six locks to the Schuylerville Yacht Basin. Just as we thought there was to be no summer in the north this year, the temperature went into the eighties and it was humid enough to make us think we could have been on the Chesapeake Bay.

Today, August 30th, a front with severe weather threatened from the west. One of the best investments we made was in the Weather Channel Marine Service which provides us a near real-time weather radar picture. The NOAA marine weather reports cover too large an area to allow moving between weather cells. With the radar picture we can see that a rain cell is a hundred miles away and safely move the boat for a couple of hours. It has saved us a week on the trip where we otherwise could have held up due to dire weather forecasts.

So this morning we moved, even though there were flood warnings for most on New York. Tracking the weather, we left early in the morning and were safely tied up in Waterford, NY by 11:30AM. Tonight we planned for dinner aboard as we could see that the rain was going to hit during the dinner hour. It is raining as I write this log entry tonight.

For those that are interested in milestones, we closed the northern loop of our cruise today when we tied up again at the Waterford town wall. We left this same wall back on July 16th as we headed west on the Erie Canal on our way to Oswego and Lake Ontario. We have put some water under the keel, enjoyed a lot of great experiences and made many new friends.

Tomorrow if the weather front passes as predicted we will be off to Catskill Creek, NY on the Hudson River where we hope to stay for two nights. We will pass by New York City in three days and have plans to visit, Port Washington, Larchmont, Milford, Greenport and Mystic Seaport before pulling into Newport, RI in Friday, September 1Oth. All this will change of course as most cruising plans do.