Locking is what new Loopers worry about most. It helps to know there are only four kinds, and that they are not equally hard.
⭐ That inverts what a nervous buyer expects, and it matters when you're deciding how much crew you need. One Looper ran Chicago to Venice, Florida entirely solo without difficulty — and wanted crew for the Erie.
A floating bollard rises and falls with the water in a recess in the wall. You put one wrap around it and that's the lock done. No tending, no second line, nobody moving about on deck while the chamber fills.
Most of the locks between Chicago and the Gulf are like this.
On most of the western river locks, one midship cleat is what you need. With a raised pilothouse and a side door, one person can lock through without leaving the helm at all — as one Gold Looper put it, he never had to.
What decides whether that works is where the cleat sits, not whether you have one. A midship cleat you can reach from the wheel is a different boat from one you have to walk to.
Lines hang down the lock wall, loose at the bottom by design. You catch one and hold it while the chamber cycles.
Here's how one crew actually does it: the second person grabs a line from the cockpit, the helm stops the boat's momentum and bumps the bow thruster to hold her against the wall, shuts down, then steps out of the side door with a boat hook and takes a line at the bow.
Read that again and count what it needs: two sets of hands or a helm you can leave instantly, a boat hook, a side door, and a bow thruster to hold position while somebody moves.
⚠️ In most Erie locks you'll be holding two lines unless there's a floating bollard. That's the practical reason this stretch wants crew.
Some Erie locks have plastic-coated steel cables, or pipes, recessed into the wall. You take a turn around one with a midship line — much easier than holding a hanging line.
🔴 But the useful part is the failure case. Those cables are supposed to be fixed at both top and bottom. Sometimes they aren't.
If you take a cable and find it loose at the bottom, move forward and take a different one.
That is a thing you cannot learn from any guide or listing, and only learn from somebody who has locked through — which is why it's here.
Lock difficulty is route-dependent, and the requirements differ.
A buyer planning a rivers-heavy route and one committed to the full Erie do not need the same boat or the same crew. The Erie wants a boat hook, a side door, a bow thruster and ideally a second person. The river run wants a well-placed midship cleat and not much else.
It's the same shape as the air-draft question — 19'6" gets you round the Loop, but 15'0" and 17'0" open routes that a taller boat gives up. What you'll meet depends on where you decide to go.
Gold Loopers and owners describing their own transits, including one who ran most of the route single-handed. Two accounts written two months apart, by people who didn't know each other, agreed on the bollard point — which is why it leads the page. We haven't locked through any of these ourselves.
If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — support@caniloop.net. A correction from someone who has actually run it is worth more than anything we can write.