Lake Superior through the Soo Locks

Tuesday, August 4

We finished our Canadian experience at Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario. Until this trip, I didn’t even know there were two cities with the same name, but they remind me of El Paso and Juarez, the way they face each other across a river. Here it’s the St. Marys River. We visited the Bushplane Museum, a large hangar filled with small, older planes that were previously used to reach the interior of Canada. The museum is a lot like the New England Air Museum or the War Eagles Museum near El Paso. Very nostalgic for me.

The locks here are called the Soo Locks. I did not understand that when I first read it, but it’s short for “Sault” the way it’s pronounced in French. When we locked through, we used the smaller Canadian Lock to enter Lake Superior. It’s for recreational boats, and requires only 10 - 15 minutes to lock through.

Lake Superior is a gorgeous but intense body of water. It has shades of aqua, sapphire and gray-green, all very clear and all side by side. We were only out for about three hours, but as the day wore on, the waves increased in size and intensity. Brian could feel the change and had to adjust our speed and course to compensate. We reached the most northerly point of our trip — 46°32’158” north latitude - then turned around. I leaned out the door to take pictures as it was too rough and windy to go out front. I did not have to touch the water - it sprayed me! The return trip increased our total locks to 75. We are quite experienced now with locking through, but one thing we have learned is to never assume it will be simple - always be alert.

Surprisingly, we are on the St. Lawrence Seaway. It extends from Lake Superior all the way east to the St. Lawrence River and into the Atlantic Ocean. It is the passageway for the enormous freighters that transport ore from Lake Superior. These ships are 1,000 feet long (we are 37’), or .166 nautical miles. The large American locks are designed to accommodate them. It takes more than an hour for one of these ships to lock through, and the lock uses 22 million gallons of water in the process. This lift is about 21 feet.

Basically, the purpose of a lock is to lift or lower boats over rocks and waterfalls. In a river, a walled canal is built to one side of a waterfall, creating a calm area for boats. There's a box in the middle of the canal that has doors at either end. To go up-river, the level of the water in the lock is let out, using gravity, until it is the same height as the lower part of the river. Then the lower door is opened and the boat enters the lock. The door is closed and the lock is filled with water from upstream, using gravity. When the height of the water reaches the height of the upper level, the door is opened and the boat exits. It's a pretty simple concept, but there are lots of variables for both the engineers and the boat captains to take into consideration.