Sunday - July 24, 2011

Lat 44 18 42; long 77 48 02; Eng 976.18; Fuel 225 gal.


After a day of rest we moved along the Trent-Severn, leaving Campbellford traveling through locks 13 through 18. I love using the Canadian charts again. They are so clear and well marked as to the channel, the canal locks and buoys and they are in colour so you can determine the colour of the buoys from the chart. Sometimes, traveling through the US, it was difficult to determine colour without a very close look at the chart in order to see the R or the G. My eyes are not as good as they used to be.

It is interesting that we are usually the only boat to go through the locks. It is not busy at all and the lockmasters seem to confirm it has been a slow year at least at this end of the Trent-Severn. Passed through a flight lock today which basically is two locks together. You enter one, let it fill and then enter the next lock immediately. Lots of nice scenery along the waterway, lots of cottages.


One of the lockmasters asked me to compare the Erie Canal to the Trent Severn. The Trent Severn, in my view is far superior for a number of reasons. The lockmasters like to converse with the boaters. The hanging cables are all spaced evenly along the walls on both sides of the chamber and are attached at the top and the bottom of the wall. In the Erie, you never knew what you would find until you got into the chamber. Sometimes there were hanging ropes, sometimes there were cables but they were not evenly spaced and the ropes were not necessarily long enough to reach the boat deck so you could be left hanging in a lock where the water was going down. Finally, the locks were grubby, we had to clean a lot of dirt off our boat after transit. Part of the reason was the ropes hanging over the boat but generally it was just dirtier.

We ended our day in Hastings – a small town on the Trent Severn where we met a couple doing the Loop who were from Australia. They were doing the Loop in stages on Happy Hours V because of US Visa requirements etc. They bought their boat in Florida so they wouldn’t have any problem with the cruising permit required for foreign flagged vessels. Unfortunately, they had been in Hastings for over two weeks waiting for a water pump. Their vessel had an engine for which there was only one place to obtain parts and that was in California. The pump had got stuck in Customs and is supposed to arrive tomorrow or Tuesday. What a place to be stuck in. You can walk around the place in about 30 minutes and there is not much to do in the way of entertainment. There was no car rentals, no buses, no way out of town, so they just waited for the part.