PORT SEVERN

An interesting day, today. We went through two of the most unique locks in the world.

The day started in Orellia when we left the marina around 8 AM and retraced our steps from yesterday toward lock #42 which had been closed due to a power failure. It, and the railroad swing bridge, were open today. In fact, they said they had opened yesterday by 2 PM. We had turned around about 1 PM, so could have gone through if we had been patient enough to wait an hour. Unfortunately, even they did not know when the power would be restored and had been told it could have been as late as 6 PM. That’s OK, we had a nice third night in Orellia.

Weather was quite nice with mostly sunny skies, minimal wind and a very nice temperature. We wound our way through rivers, lakes and canals until we got to Lock # 43, one of the deepest conventional locks in the world. It lowered us about 45 feet.

Elaine, looking up where we just came from

The next lock, #44, also known as “The Big Chute” is actually a rail system with a flatbed car dropping down into the water in one lake, loading on the boats, then going by rail up and over a dividing berm to another lake.

The Big Chute just after loading

They can only take 2 or 3 boats at a time (depending on the size of the boats), so we did have to wait a bit to catch our ride over. The lock attendants really like the PDQ catamarans since we basically sit flat on our bottom, so they don’t have to use the cradles and slings to stabilize us for the ride. They have learned, however, to keep the back 4-6 feet of the PDQs hanging off the back side of the flatbed so no damage will occur to the area around the props.

Traveling down on the rail car

Several times today we went through “Narrows,” areas of a half-mile or so where the water is quite constrained by the narrow channel and the current flow was very strong. On a couple of these I had to announce on the VHF radio that I was entering the channel downbound (with the current) and hope anyone close to entering upbound would wait until I had passed. The downbound vessel has the right-of-way over the upbound vessel, since it is more difficult to maneuver while going with the current.

We had thought we would actually make it all the way to Georgian Bay today, but we stopped just a bit short for a few reasons; 1) we were getting a bit tired 2) the weather had worsened a bit and the winds on Georgian Bay were strong enough to kick up a decent chop and 3) we had a nice place to stop and tie up at Lock #45 and weren’t sure where else we could comfortably stop for the night if we didn’t make it all the way.

So, tomorrow morning we will go through the last of the 45 locks on the Trent-Severn Waterway which we started 11 days ago in Trenton…