Days 61-63, June 27-29, 2012: After Smith Falls the Rideau Canal region changes radically from rolling farmland to heavily wooded mountainous terrain. The terrain is the southern edge of the Canadian Shield, a gigantic granite escarpment that covers much of eastern Canada from northern Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and Labrador to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. The Thousand Islands form the southeastern extremity. So it is that the Rideau Canal was dug out of the granite by pick and shovel 180 years ago. The stretch from Ottawa to Smith Falls was created by damming parts of the Rideau River and digging out channels through the granite to link the segments. The engineering feat was that many of the locks were built before the dams. Then the dams were built to flood the locks. Some of the channels we came through today were at times no more than 40 feet wide between shear rock walls. The water is crystal clear and I felt as though I could reach down and touch the rock.
Days 60-62, June 24-26, 2012: The upper Rideau Canal region is quite varied. The canal along the southern suburbs of Ottawa is breathtaking. Parks and walkways strung together for miles including beaches on Dows Lake to the south of the city create many acres of green space. After Ottawa the landscape turns rural—small towns, farms, and big homes at canal’s edge. All the straight parts one finds houses with lots of toys—airplanes, boats, pieds-à-terre. We shared the waterway with lots of people on Sunday but on Monday everyone had gone home to work except the occasional fisherman.
Day 58, 59, and 60, June 21-24, 2012: We have spent the last three days tied up alongside a Parks Canada dock in downtown Ottawa. Coming up the eight-step lock from the Ottawa River to the city in 100-degree heat was a chore. The process took about two and a half hours. I will attach a choppy video of the procedure. You will notice that many of the locksters are college students doing backbreaking work operating the lock doors and sluices by hand.
Day 55, June 18, 2012: The highlight of a lovely week in Montreal is time spent with family and old friends. After all the dire warnings about the commercial traffic on the St. Lawrence going upstream to Montreal, we found ourselves all but alone of a chilly Monday morning. We passed one freighter headed upstream laboring against the 3-knot current. We made the 40-mile run from Sorel in just under 2 hours, finding no reason to loaf and fight the flow.