DREAM TESTER
Wiles, the proprietor of Mid-Lakes Navigation, says cruisers yearning to do the Loop sometimes take a dry run by renting a boat and tackling the Canal. For some it can be a cautionary tale, while for others it can be just the experience they need to take the leap.
“Three years ago an environmental science professor at Penn State University rent a boat from us,” Wiles said. “After the cruise [he] bought a boat and converted it to a solar-powered hybrid and did the Loop. He left in June and returned a year later.”
As if the story weren’t remarkable enough, Bob Duthie, the cruising professor in question, claims that 60 percent of his cruising time was done purely on solar power. (For more on him, read “Cruising America’s Great Loop in a Solar Powered Canal Boat” at www.PassageMaker.com.)
Begun by Wiles’s visionary father, Peter “The Skipper” Wiles Sr., in 1968, Mid-Lakes Navigation starts with the family’s purchase of Pat II, a small antique boat that had a contract with the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail to homes on Skaneateles Lake. Inspired by a British narrowboat vacation he had taken in 1987, Wiles Sr. designed the canal boats that Mid-Lakes now builds and rents.
Lauded as a champion for the rebirth of the Erie Canal by civic leaders, Wiles Sr. saw the potential for tourism on the waterway. Four of his children continue to operate the company today as well as continuing to build and maintain the boats in a barn not far from Skaneateles Lake in Borodino, New York.
Cayuga, our rented 41-footer, is far more comfortable than her exterior may delineate. Equipped with two small cabins separated by sliding doors, Cayuga is replete with a galley, two heads and a shower, as well as an interior finished in knotty pine all topped off with a propane heater. She also has a canvas-enclosed bow with cushioned benches and a long flat cabin top from which boaters can view the passing scene while reading a book, sipping a glass of wine, or munching on an apple. Those in need of some terra firma can grab a bicycle from the boat’s rooftop rack and pedal alongside the canal on the towpath where the mules would have once trod.
For cruisers used to storm-tossed passages, drifting along Clinton’s Ditch at 51/ knots—only a touch faster than canal boats
2 would have traveled in 1897—is a study in slo-mo. What would be a one-hour trip between towns by automobile is a one-day passage by water and it may not be a rarity to have a silver-haired and 70-something jogger overtake you on the canal path.
On the America’s Great Loop Cruiser’s Association’s website, ( www.greatloop.com) Rick Butler, a retired U.S. Navy captain advises prospective Loopers to plan to enter the Erie at Waterford, New York, just above Albany, after June 1.
“Earlier arrivals are subject to lots of [potentially] damaging floating drift,” Butler writes. “High water from spring runoff and snow-melt can also often trap people in the canals due to high water/lock flooding, sometimes for a week or more.”