Word: lockings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lines holding his command to the New York State department of transportation dock and eases it slowly, stern-first, out into the basin. Then, his craft clear, Kaldefoss settles himself behind the huge, spoked steering wheel that dominates the Peckinpaugh's pilothouse and steers for the lock leading from the harbor to the Erie Canal, a 338-mile-long liquid highway that runs from Buffalo, on Lake Erie, all the way east to Albany on the Hudson River. "Well," says Kaldefoss in a voice still heavy with the cadences of his native Norway, "here we go again...
...operates the Peckinpaugh, is one of the last shippers still using the water route across New York. But the Peckinpaugh and its eight-man crew remain and, more important, pay their way. "This isn't an exhibit in a museum," says Kaldefoss as the gates of the harbor lock swing open to receive him and his ship. "This is a real working boat...
That it has a working crew becomes clear as the boat enters the lock. With practiced ease, Deck Hand Basil Kuvshinikov, whose name and accent both attest to his origins in the Russian city of Smolensk, steps ashore and walks beside the slowly moving boat, a loop of its thick forward hawser over his shoulder. As he slips the loop over one of the mushroom-shaped bollards onshore, another deck hand, a stocky, bearded man named Tim Burke, tightens the line, snubbing the Peckinpaugh to the side of the lock...
Passing through the lock takes only a few minutes. No sooner have the gates closed behind it than the Peckinpaugh begins to rise, buoyed by the water pouring into the rectangular lock enclosure until its rail towers above the head of the lock keeper. A moment later, the lock's forward gates swing open and the ship sails on, a full 16 ft. higher than it was when it entered. Ahead of it stretches the Erie Canal, as straight and flat as a highway...
...wish I were going with them," says Lock Keeper Bob Walker as he welcomes the Peckinpaugh to Lock 21. "It gets kind of lonely here in the fall." Glad for the company, Walker seems in no hurry to lock the Peckinpaugh through. A barrel-shaped man, he stands at the side of the lock chatting as the water pours out, dropping the boat a full 26 ft. He and the Peckinpaugh's crewmen talk like neighbors who have not seen one another for a while. Walker reports that the man who used to be in charge of the next...