July 14, 2008: Canal de la Rivesud

We left the Montreal Yacht Club this morning after buying one of their marine pennants with the clock tower logo in red, yellow and blue as a souvenir of our fun time here. The staff there was very nice there and nicely bilingual.

Did you know that Montreal is an island? We have spent the day heading west, leaving Montreal City on the eastern tip and traveled around the south side of the island. The reason we have made so little progress is that the locks we had to travel through were commercial locks, not the ones run by the park system. These locks are working locks along a broad canal for the gigantic cargo ships traveling the St Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. The time we spent waiting at the first lock, St Lambert Lock, gave us time to get the rhythm of the operation. The ships would line up on the side of the lock and side along the wooden molding mounted there to be aligned with the lock. There was a lift bridge in the train trestle that ran over the lock. The lifted section of the track was lifted with huge counter balances which glided down the erector set tower as the track went up. So in addition to threading the big ships through, the lock master had to make sure the bridge was closed for train traffic at the appropriate times. The bridge had to be open for the ships to come through the lock. We saw a couple of trains and a couple of ships in the four hours we waited for them to squeeze us in.

The second lock was the deepest lock we have seen. You pull into this great cavern, and can see the lock master above you like he was standing on the top of a three story building. He threw us down long yellow ropes (took several tries for us to catch them), and then we monitored the ropes as the lock filled raising us 36 feet.

After the locks, we crossed the St Louis Lake which was similar to the Pamlico Sound in roughness. It was amazing that we saw four small sailboats racing in the choppy waves. The channel across the shoal laden lake was well marked and led to the Becker “canal in the lake”. The Becker Dam was built in 1873 and consists of two parallel jetties, concrete breakfronts with natural greenery and trees, 120 feet apart and 1200 feet long in the lake. Between the jetties the depth is a consistent 10 feet deep providing for safe passage of boats approaching the locks. This project was built to enable the Ottawa River to connect to Montreal for early lumber and fur trading.

We arrived in Saint Anne de Bellevue around 8:00 PM and were happy to find a place to tie up along their quaint wooden boardwalk with large flower boxes and a row of open air restaurants. For our travel beyond Montreal, we need the navigational charts for these waterways, and Tom has located them at a Marine Supply store in Dorval. So that is the plan for tomorrow –buy maps.