Today we finally (after much waiting) start the lock system. It's a long journey yet, 23 Erie Canal locks, and then 7 Oswego Canal locks before we get back to Lake Ontario.

We started pretty early and the Troy lock was first up. We ended up having to wait a bit as we just missed a locking, but we went through pretty smoothly and then onto the section they call the flight. It's basically 5 locks back to back each with a height of 34 feet. It takes some time, but you basically motor in, grab some lines, hold on while you go up 34 feet, let go of lines, and then a tiny short motor to the next lock and repeat 5 times.

After those it was a 13NM motor to lock E-7, which we went through no problem and caught up to Mr. Turtle at. After coming through E-7 and on our way to E-8, I noticed a sudden change in tone with the motor exhaust, and looking at the output what seemed like less water than normal. I had Theone take the helm, and opened the engine bay to see a fair amount of water coming out of the exhaust muffler. So, we quickly pulled out of the channel, and dropped anchor so we could turn the engine off.

This isn't a super big surprise, as we knew the muffler was suspect a long while ago. We first noticed a tiny pinhole drip from the muffler all the way back in Holden Beach, NC on our way down south. I bought some JB Weld as a hack fix if we needed it, and we continued on our way at the time. On our way back north, I noticed it was leaking more than a pinhole, and so I ordered a replacement muffler when we were in Norfolk. I still had hope it might make it home where I'd have time to properly replace it, but no such luck, and so here we are now, stuck in the Erie Canal.

So at anchor I got to work pulling out the broken muffler and fitting in the new replacement. As with most projects, nothing ever goes smoothly, and first problem was hose size fittings. The old muffler had a 1.5" OD pipe for the output side, but a 1.75" OD pipe for the input. The replacement muffler I ordered had 1.5" for both, so already things were not fitting so well. To make matters worse, the exhaust pipe from the engine is 2", and it looks like it was kind of gooped onto the 1.75" pipe and made to fit even though it's bigger than that.

So as I'm installing it I'm coming to the realization that I have a 2" ID hose, with a 1.5" OD fitting, that isn't going to work. As I didn't have much option at this point, I attempted to use some exhaust sealer to fit the large hose, but after futzing around and clamping it as well as I could, you could pretty much tell it wasn't going to work. We gave it some time to set and then tried it out and it just blew out the sealer and was spewing the exhaust water into the bilge.

At this point we realized we weren't going to fix this right here right now, so we decided to try and quickly run the engine and get us back to lock 7 where we could tie up to the wall and hopefully figure out some way to get parts. We had a lot of water coming through the exhaust but we made it over there with the bilge pump going and using the manual bilge pump to keep up without flooding the floorboards.

At the dock we got fended off and tied up, and then made some plans on what to do. I took an uber into town and made it to a few different auto parts shops before they closed and found an exhaust reducer for 2" ID to 1.5" ID, which isn't quite right, I needed OD sizes, but as close as I could find. Also got some 1.5" coolant hose as well.

After getting all of that back to the boat, I realized that wasn't going to work either. I could force the 1.5" ID hose onto the 1.5" ID pipe (not easily, but enough to make it work), but there was no way I was getting the exhaust hose onto the 2" ID pipe. At this point it was too late to get more parts, so we called it a night with plans for Theone to go in tomorrow morning and get a different pipe fitting.

After much researching and checking parts stocks, we found a store that had a few different exhaust reducers that should fit. The key piece of information being that the 2" exhaust hose, when actually measured was more like 1.9". With that we found a 1.5" OD to 1.75" ID exhaust reducer, which including the wall thickness works out to a ~1.9" OD fitting, exactly what we needed.

Tomorrow we'll pick that part up and hopefully complete the repair so we can be on our way.