Day 102...Burritts Rapids Lock to Black Rapids Lock, Ontario

MONDAY, JULY 9, 2012

     We left the wall at 8:50 a.m. this morning headed to Ottawa.  We’ll probably have one more stop before we get there.  We were out of the Burritts Rapids Lock (Lock 17, down 9 feet) by 9:00 a.m.  We are going to travel in the Rideau River with all day long. 

     So far the scenery is almost exactly the same with farmland on the banks and reeds and grasses at the edge of the water.  Along the canal we saw a rustic home that I could picture in a movie about Mounties in the snow-covered Rockies.  It even had the requisite moose and elk horns on the log outbuilding.

     Finally I was fast enough to take a picture of turtles sunbathing on a log.  Usually Gary has already passed the turtles before I can get my camera ready to take the picture but not this time.  They remind me of an addition problem in Kindergarten.  You have two turtles on a log.  One climbs on the log to join them.  How many turtles do you have on the log now?  You never stop being a teacher.

     Gary and I think alike the majority of the time. When I saw he was looking at the land on the port side of the boat, my eye went to a beautiful willow tree on the bank.  Then he said something about a seaplane.  I looked again and saw a red, white and blue plane pulled up on the bank.  I guess our thoughts weren’t in sync this time.

     We started seeing more and more homes that were geared toward water activities.  There were slides at the edge of the water and even diving boards floating out in the river.  One home even looked like it could be a summer camp.

     As we got closer to Ottawa, there were pockets of huge houses all along the shore.

     Before we could get into the next locks, they had to move the vehicular bridge out of the way.  I know the cars get tired of having to stop for the boat traffic.  The Long Island Swing Bridge was one that someone had to open by hand using a crank handle.  In this case it was a slanted pipe-looking bar that fit into the bridge.  The lock person walked around and around in a circle to move the bridge beside the lock.  At Narrows Lock we watched the lock keeper open the swing bridge in the same way, but her crank handle looked like a V with two connected bars instead of one.  Sometimes the mechanical stuff amazes me.

     As we passed through Long Island Locks (Locks 16, 15 & 14, down 25 feet), you could see the bridge at eye level at first and then over your head from the bottom of the first lock before moving into the second one.  

     While we were in the locks, the lockmaster called ahead to Black Rapids to see if they had space at the top of the lock.  He said not to get our hopes up because they had no space a little while ago.  Well, our luck held out.  Space had opened up so we were on our way to Black Rapids to spend the night.

     Five miles later we arrived.  At first it didn’t look like there was any space at all until we spied a short dock around behind the two big boats that were already there.  There was just enough space for our 30-foot tug.  We were home for the night at Black Rapids.

     We traveled 31 miles today in 5 hours and 10 minutes.  Our total now is 1848 miles.