This double lock has two chambers, 3 Gates, (the ominous 50 foot high middle gate is shared between the two. If Lock 17 doesn’t intimidate you, this one will when looking up from the bottom.

Both are old but remarkable engineering accomplishments.

Lockport’s twin locks have a combined lift is just shy of 50 feet. (Lock 17 was 40.5 feet with its single chamber.)

In a busy port, we had a more complex transit than we were accustomed to. But we just followed the excursion boat Lockview through the slightly more complicated process.

The lower chamber floods.

Once the lower chamber is flooded, the gates open and we enter next to the boats going down. Then they move to the lower chamber which will be going down while we are going up.

Once our upper chamber is finished flooding, the gates open and we are free to continue westward … 50 feet higher than we were 20 minutes ago, and 540 feet higher than we were 3 weeks ago!

These are our final locks on the Erie Canal.

A little west, the excursion boat Lockview which we followed into and out of the locks today, asked that we slow and allow them to turn around to head back to Lockport with their 40 or so passengers.

We stopped for the night with John and Christine of YOLO here at the West Canal Marina Park facilities, operated by Niagara County, near Tonawanda NY. (This marina is just over the town line in Pendleton NY.)

There are only 5.37 miles of Erie Canal remaining for us to the west. Then we enter the Niagara River in Tonawanda. After about 10 miles of the Niagara River we’ll be in Buffalo on Lake Erie with Ontario Canada on the north shore, and four US states to the south and west: NY, PA, OH, and MI.