Thirty Tugs at the Front Door: Waterford Tugboat Roundup Fills the Erie Canal’s Gateway, September 11–13

For three days this past weekend, the front door of the Erie Canal belonged to the tugboats. The 2026 Waterford Tugboat Roundup ran Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13 along a quarter mile of canal frontage at Lock E-2 Park in Waterford, the Saratoga County village where the Hudson and Mohawk rivers meet and where every westbound boat begins its climb up the five-lock Waterford Flight.

A Parade Up the Hudson, With a Conductor at the Helm

Working tugs, historic tugs, mini-tugs and barges assemble in Albany and run north up the Hudson in a line, arriving in Waterford Harbor at roughly 5:45 p.m. on Friday. The New York State Canal Corporation put a 25-yard security zone around the participating vessels between 5:30 and 6 p.m. and closed the Waterford Canal Harbor to overnight docking by non-participants from 7 a.m. Thursday through 5 p.m. Sunday, though the channel itself stayed open to through-traffic.

This year’s Grand Marshal was David Alan Miller, music director of the Albany Symphony. The choice was a nod to the orchestra’s Water Music NY: More Voices festival, a summer-long partnership with the Canal Corporation that brought free concerts to canal communities from Albany to Buffalo. “I am deeply honored,” Miller said of the appointment, calling the Roundup a celebration of the “character and spirit of New York’s waterways.”

Tug Tours, Line Tosses and Fireworks Over the Harbor

Saturday was the long day. Docked tugs opened for tours from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., free boat rides ran from the boat launch at the foot of First Street, and Lock 2 hosted a farmers market, a bounce house, face painting and a Waterford Fire Department obstacle course. The Mariners Line Toss, a heaving-line competition that rewards the kind of accuracy deckhands need in a real lock, held its opening round at 2 p.m. outside the visitor center. Fireworks lit the harbor at 8:45 p.m. Sunday brought a second day of tours and rides, the line-toss finals at noon and an awards ceremony at 1 p.m.

Tug Talks: History Told by the People Who Lived It

The Roundup’s quieter side is its series of Tug Talks on Peebles Island. This year’s slate leaned hard into anniversaries. Phil Johnson, project director of New York’s 1976 Bicentennial Barge, led a retrospective panel on that floating exhibition 50 years on. New York State Marine Highway, one of the event’s major sponsors, presented “Ship By Canal,” a look at how oversized cargo still moves by barge on the system today. Russ VanDervoort recounted the last trip of the canal boat J.W. Lee, which went over a dam at Waterford, and Sunday closed with Brad Utter on Revolutionary New York and the Erie Canal.

Why Waterford Matters

The Roundup began in 1999 as a one-day gathering and has grown into the largest publicly accessible assembly of tugboats in the northeastern United States, typically drawing about 30 vessels and thousands of visitors. More than 80 different boats have taken part since the first year. The Canal Corporation and the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor Commission are among its major sponsors.

The setting explains the appeal. The Village of Waterford, founded in 1794, is the oldest continually incorporated village in the country, and the Waterford Flight above it lifts boats 169 feet in under two miles, the steepest set of locks in the world. On a weekend when the canal has just dropped back to standard 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. hours and the October 14 close of navigation is a month away, the Roundup is a reminder that the Erie Canal is still a working waterway, and that the boats that do the work are worth a trip to see.