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.
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