Saturday, June 23, Day 50:  Under partly cloudy skies, and with a fairly strong westerly wind, we departed Sylvan Beach and headed across the 20 mile wide Oneida Lake toward our next destination, Brewerton.   Brewerton is a popular town for loopers because it has a number of marine facilities for making last-minute boat repairs and reprovisioning before exiting the US and entering Canada at the north side of Lake Ontario.    At Brewerton, we parked Rickshaw at Winter Harbor marina, which is so named because it has a huge heated warehouse for storing boats over the winter.     Since we had not bought fuel since the Chesapeake, we topped off our 3 diesel tanks with 500 gallons of fuel, and filled up our water tanks.

Friday, June 22, Day 49:  After sleeping 10 hours we rolled out of bed at 8:30 to discover we were the only boat on the dock!  We desperately needed the rest.  Rickshaw pulled away from the dock a little before 10am.  We did four more locks today - the first two raised us up but the last two locks dropped us down.  This was the first time we locked down.  Locking down seems somewhat easier - the currents don't seem as strong with the water draining out of the lock and the process seems to go faster when the lock is draining.  We docked for the evening at a free city dock at Sylvan Beach which is at the eastern end of the local recreation lake, Oneida Lake.  We were greeted by two Loopers (from different boats) who caught our lines and then later we met two more Looper boats.  One was  Bill and Laura on Kindred Sprits  whom we had talked with on the VHF when we were headed to Atlantic City.  Sylvan Beach was a very cute little tourist town, with a retro 1950’s feel, complete with hamburger shacks, ice cream parlors, and a small amusement park on the waterfront.   This part of New York can have a very severe winter, worse than Buffalo, due to the lake effect of Lake Ontario, so the locals really try to get out on the water and enjoy the brief summer weather while they can.