A sloop tied up in Burlington Bay last week hails from Oberlin, Ohio. It’s owned by Dan Stinebring and Lynn Powell, who reached Burlington after a 740-mile, three-week journey through lakes, narrow canals and dozens of locks.
“You’re going through towns that are quite different than the ones that I have spent a lot of time in, and people’s lives are very different,” Stinebring said. “And so, we had a lot of interesting interactions that way.”
The couple are retired professors from Oberlin College, he of physics and astronomy, she of creative writing and poetry. Stinebring grew up in Vermont, and they have family and friends still in the area, as well as a daughter in Manhattan. So, in late June, Stinebring and Powell boarded their Aloha 34 sailboat — aptly named Polaris — and cast off.
They sailed in Lake Erie until they reached the Erie Canal in Buffalo, N.Y. Their mast is too tall for the waterway’s overhead bridges, but their 35-horsepower diesel engine allowed them to putter along the 340-mile waterway at 6 miles per hour.
They saw bald eagles, herons and ospreys, and they encountered interesting people, too. For example, a fisherman drove them to a grocery store to resupply, waited as they shopped and returned them to their boat.
“People were friendly,” Powell said. “They were eager to tell us their story.”
They reached the Hudson River north of Albany, N.Y., then tacked north for the Champlain Canal, which leads to the southern end of Lake Champlain. From there, they sailed to Burlington.
They planned to stay for several weeks before setting sail for home.
“It was fascinating to just be out of your own bubble and to be traveling in a slow enough way that you needed the help of these folks, too, in various ways,” Powell said. “You connected across a lot of differences.”