The Skipper Spills His Coffee

Yesterday, September 4, Whisper became a motorboat. Actually we had had to motor from Sacket's Harbor, that bastion of 1812 glory, to Oswego as, what little wind there was, was smack on Whisper's nose. That said, the mast was still up and sails were still on. She was still, technically, a sailboat. Now her mast is lashed on deck, her sails stowed and her only means of motivation is diesel fuelled.

Ever eager to make distance east, I was up before dawn making final preparations to enter the Oswego canal en route to the eastern portion of the Erie Canal.

Promptly at 0700h I radioed the Oswego lock master to let me through lock 8. His response: You'll have to wait while I empty the lock. So I put Whisper in a circle, motoring dead slow and we wandered just outside the main channel.

Suddenly Whisper stopped dead in the water with a thud, spilling my coffee and shattering my morning calm. The depth sounder read 13 feet under the keel. So my first words of the new day, spoken rather LOUDLY, were "What the f*#k?" Good morning Oswego!

I had checked the chart the previous evening for depths on the seawalls looking for the best place to tie up. What I didn't see were those tiny little stars, mid-harbor, that signify rocks......a whole string of them. My eyesight just ain't what it used to be!

Fortunately Whisper slid off easily. There were no sounds of crunching fiberglass and no water entering the hull. So I continued through the Oswego Canal. With apologies to Matt Maurer who did such an amazing job fairing Whisper's bottom and keel in 2008, I'll do a proper damage assessment when I find water clear enough to swim in.

As I write this, Whisper is docked in Phoenix, NY adjacent to all the yachtsmen enjoying Labor Day week-end on the river and a genial Canadian couple making their way south for the winter.

Tomorrow Whisper enters the Erie Canal at the junction of the Oneida, Oswego and Seneca Rivers. From there we transit the length of Lake Oneida and 160 miles to Troy, NY.

The leaves are just starting to turn color, but I do not think we'll see fall in its full glory on the Hudson River. It's almost enough to make me stop and wait a couple weeks, but reality is starting to assert herself. The push is on.