Days 89...Kingston, Ontario to Upper Brewers Lock

TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2012

     So far it looks like a good day to travel.  We walked to the post office to mail some postcards.  After I found out that they cost $1.05 apiece to mail, I decided to buy more postcards in Canada but mail them in the US.  I call it frugal. 

     Gary needed to go get some line to put on another fender and some more charts.  We went to Vandervoort General Store.  It had everything.  It had house wares, toys, kid’s clothes, gardening supplies, marine equipment and many boating books.  It was a very interesting store.

     There was a Farmer’s Market today in Springer Market Square behind the city hall.  There were fruits, vegetables, flowers, jewelry, baked goods and crafts.  We bought raspberries, blueberries, potatoes and a pecan butter tart.

     We left the marina at 11:35 a.m.  Our first task was to pass under an “18 foot” bridge to get into the Inner Harbor.  We were almost clear of the bridge when we heard a very loud SNAP.  Now we know the bridge wasn’t 18 feet at all.  The chop on the water made us bump up into the bottom of the bridge.   It knocked the anchor light down.  Good thing Gary can fix anything.

     The water was very well marked.  There were red and green buoys everywhere.  The clean red ones are very pointed on top.  The flat-topped green ones usually have bird poop all over them.  The difference is that the birds can’t sit on the pointed red ones, but they can sit on the flat green ones.  We continued through the canal with water lilies and grasses on the banks. 

     The Rideau Canal is approximately 126 miles long with 14 locks that raise the boater 165 feet from 243 feet above sea level at Kingston to 408 feet at the Upper Rideau Lake and then 32 locks lower the boater 274 feet to Ottawa on the Ottawa River at 134 feet above sea level. The locks on the Rideau Canal are operated manually.  Most of the time the locks provide the boaters with a small lift of usually between 8 -12 feet.  If the lift needs to be greater, there will be a series of locks combined into “staircase” or “step locks”.

     We wound our way through the canal and stopped on the blue line (an actual line painted blue) for the Kingston Mills Locks that are the first locks on the Rideau Canal.  That means we want to go through.  If we stop anywhere else that means we are not going through.  

     We had to buy our passes there.  There are two types of passes you can purchase while cruising on Canadian Historic Canals.  The first is the Mooring Pass that covers docking or tying up for the night.  There is also a Locking Pass that allows us to lock through the locks on the canals.  We bought seasonal passes from Dustin, the Lockmaster, for both since we are going to take our time.

     The Kingston Mills Locks (Step Locks 49,48,47 for 38 feet) and Lock 46 (10 feet) were not very hard.  The locks are going to start with the high numbers and go down because we are going backwards on the waterway.  We went up by ourselves so we didn’t have to worry about other boaters.  In these locks you loop a line around the plastic coated cables one at the front of the boat and one at the back of the boat and hold on as the ropes slide up or down the cable.

     We then headed out into Colonel By Lake and then into River Styx.  They are lakes created by flooding the land when the locks were built.  It’s important to stay in the channel because there are still stumps and other obstructions outside of the channel after all these years.  Colonel By was the engineer who designed and built the Rideau Canal.  A lot of things around here are named for him.  More about him later.

     We passed through Lower Brewers Lock (Lock 45, 13.5 feet) 

and made our way to Upper Brewers Lock where we hoped to spend the night.  There was just enough room for us to slip in front of a little orange houseboat.  More about them later.

 

     Home for the night.  We traveled 17 miles in a little over 3 hours.  We have gone a total of 1741 miles.