September 20

Today we arrived in New York City - the Big Apple. It is hard to believe that we are here, and even harder to believe how much fun it has been.

The George Washington Bridge is visible from some distance, and it is exciting to watch the New York skyline take shape beneath it.

Even more exciting is tying up to a mooring ball at the 79th Street Boat Basin in the heart of downtown Manhattan. We are now looking forward to exploring New York City in the next few days .





Our travels so far have covered, in statute miles

Bay City to Tonawanda 558.1
Tonawanda to Waterford (Erie Canal) 339.7
Waterford to New York City (Hudson River) 153.6

The total is 1 051.4 miles.

PS Hope you're enjoying the blogs. We are having fun with it, but also really enjoy hearing from you!

September 19

Today was a great trip from Newburgh to Haverstraw Bay.

Pollepel Island is one of the highlights along the way. Between 1900 and 1918, Bannerman, a munitions dealer, built a replica of a medieval castle as a summer resort and storehouse on Pollepel Island. The castle burned in 1967, but the remaining structure is still quite striking.

Further along the river is West Point, the famed United States Military Academy, which opened in 1802.

We anchored in Haverstraw Bay early in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day relaxing in the sun and doing odd jobs. Rather unbelievably, this makes only the second night we have anchored out.

Late in the afternoon, six or seven more boats slip into the bay and the Wednesday evening sailboat races are underway.

September 17-18

Paul and Delight dropped us off at the boat early Monday morning and it was back to work. I had wanted to check a few more wires and stumbled across a very loose ground wire. I tightened it up and checked the electrical panel and everything was working. With a big smile I told Corinne I had fixed the problem and she said, ‘Are you sure?’

I replied, ‘If you don’t trust me, let’s go ask Mike.’ Remember the electrical guru? I’m not sure he believed me either because he said, ‘I’ll drop by in a few minutes and you can show me what you did.’

Well, it passed the test and things are going great.

The mornings are getting a little cooler and with that comes the mist over the water. This is a picture looking out onto the Hudson River from the boat this morning. We have to wait for a while for it to burn off and then we are on our way to Newburgh.

September 14-16

Finally, it’s time to get the mast up. The crew at Riverview Marina is excellent, and we have the mast stepped by lunch time. After moving the boat to a slip, where we will leave it for the next couple of days, we begin the task of turning Gormã into a sailboat.

Things were going well when Mike, the marina owner and electrical guru, dropped by. Under his guidance we set to tracing wires and putting the voltmeter on this and that and, after two hours, concluded beyond any doubt that there was no power!

That, however, was as far as we get before Paul and Delight, Corinne’s cousin and his wife, picked us up. We will spend the weekend with them at their cabin in Monterey in the Berkshires.

Our timing could not have been better for spending a weekend off the boat. We woke up to a rainy, cool Saturday morning. After breakfast, we decided to visit the Norman Rockwell Gallery at Stockford. It was a fascinating display, the highlight of which was seeing Rockwell’s actual studio.

The picture shown is from a series of pictures developed to support Roosevelt's four freedoms - this one depicting freedom of speech. Rockwell struggled for a long time to get this just right. What is most interesting is this picture was one of the few hanging in his studio.

In the afternoon we went for a short hike on the ‘cobble’ and then out for a wonderful dinner.

Sunday was again rather cool and cloudy, perfect hiking weather. Delight selected a wonderful hike called the Ice Glen, with a sometimes vigorous climb to the top of a large hill featuring a panoramic view of the Berkshires.

September 12-13

Where did that day go? We woke up this morning with the best of intentions, and before we knew it the day was gone.

While checking our email at the Visitor Centre we began chatting with Tom and Trudy, who have been cruising the ICW for the past ten or twelve years. They are a wealth of information and we ended up joining them for a late brunch.

We resolved to leave early the next morning.

We did get away in good time. Waterford opens directly to the Hudson River. We passed through yet one more lock, the Troy lock, before reaching Troy. Around the first corner in town, we passed this little cruiser. Things may be getting bigger as we move towards New York City.

Our destination is Riverview Marina on Catskill Creek where we will have our mast stepped. However, we have to stop in Albany to pick up a cruising permit from US Customs and Immigration. If we had entered the US with the boat, we would have picked it up at that time. Since we began our trip in Michigan, this did not happen, and seemed to pose a conundrum for officials.

As we are pulling up to the city dock, we lost power to our instruments and chartplotter – no, on closer inspection we had no electrical power at all. This was unnerving, and we hoped not an omen of our meeting with the Customs officer. However, the meeting was very cordial, and we continued on our way, although without our electrical power. The rest of our trip went very smoothly.

This is a lighthouse quite near our final destination.