Ray and Deb's Great Loop Cruise: Week 15, Sept 14-22

This will be our final post for this boating season. We have learned that if you click on any of these pictures they will enlarge for better viewing. To return just click on the back button. In the prior post, we were in Montreal. In this post, we have left Montreal and are making our way to Mooney Bay Marina just outside Plattsburgh, New York on Lake Champlain where the boat will be stored for the winter. We intend to return to the boat June 1st of 2010, so this blog will stay dormant during the winter. We don't know if this site will be deleted because of inactivity; we may have to start a new one. We have never done this before.

Leaving Montreal, we needed fuel so 2 miles east of Montreal we stopped and this 1924 wooden boat was sitting across from the fuel dock.

This is Marina Saurel at Sorel, Quebec. Sorel is 50 miles east of Montreal on the St. Lawrence River and is where we entered the Richelieu River that will take us through the St. Ours Lock and the Chambly Canal Locks enroute to Lake Champlain. A mile west of here is the entrance to the Richelieu River.

We have just left Marina Saurel; in this picture we are looking east down the St. Lawrence River with the marina in the background. We are directly in front of the entrance to the Richelieu River so I took this picture below looking west up the St. Lawrence.

This is the entrance to the Richelieu River with the grain mill on the left.

A picture of the river one mile south of the town of Sorel.

Three pictures of the St. Ours Lock. It is about 75 miles from Sorel to Plattsburgh, New York. Because it's a river and we throw such a large wake, we never traveled over 8 knots so we split this stretch up into 3 days. After we went through this lock, we started looking for someplace to stay. We ended up staying at Chambly Marina right at the entrance to the Chambly Locks which is a series of 8 locks.

The picture below is the entrance to the Chambly Locks. It's a series of 8 locks with this first being a series of 3 locks or a flight lock. To the left of this picture is the marina where we spent the night. It is 8:30 in the morning and the lock system has just opened. We are the first ones in.

In the picture above and below, we are at the top of the third lock. These two pictures are looking either direction. We had to wait about 15 minutes for the school bus to pass so they could open the swing bridge and let us go.

In this picture and the one above, we have just exited the first set of locks. The Chambly Canal is a stretch of eight locks and, as you can see, quite narrow canals. It was really cool. The series of 8 locks took us 4 hours.

In this picture, we are approaching the fourth lock. The canal widens into a turnaround pool and then narrows up again.

Took this picture of a shy lock attendant.

We never met oncoming traffic.

Canal on right side - river on left. You are only seeing a small portion of the river. It is actually quite wide here with rapids.

We are approaching the north end of St. Jean, Quebec. Just one more lock to go.

Town of St. Jean is on the right. We spent the night here at Le Nautique St. Jean Marina. Our highlight here was great fish & chips. Went to pay with credit card and discovered they did not accept credit card. We could not come up with enough cash, so Deb sat at the restaurant while I rode the bike back to the boat for cash.

Le Nautique St. Jean Marina is on the left. You can see the entrance to the Chambly Canal looking north.

We have just passed the U.S./Canadian border. Fort Montgomery was built in the early 1800s and is abandoned. It is privately owned. There is quite a debate going on about whether it should be preserved.

Just as we were approaching the border, we saw the Canadian customs office, a small brick building on the edge of the river. It had a place for you to tie your boat and check in. We crossed the border and this US fort and saw a large flashing orange highway sign that said "Customs" with a huge arrow pointing to US Customs. All they had was a white construction trailer with a rickety floating dock. Wow, looks like they were roughing it. We are members of the Nexus system which allows us to just phone in to Customs; so I was going to pass them by and call when arriving at Plattsburgh, about 12 miles south of here. As we were passing, we saw three agents heading down to the dock to jump into their high-powered inflatable to chase us down. So I told Deb, maybe we should head over there and say hi. It was a good thing we did. I was right. They were on their way to board us. Being the diplomat that I am, I got things smoothed out and we were on our way.

Next stop, Mooney Bay Marina, Plattsburgh, New York.

We arrived 6 days before they could pull the boat. We needed to rent a car to drive home, so we decided to rent one for the week.

We had time to kill, so we drove to Burlington, Vermont to a National Hot Rod Association meet.

The remainder of the pictures are of Mooney Bay Marina. Met some very nice people here. We were invited to the end-of-season party on Saturday night. There is a restaurant on the property that closes after Labor Day. They opened for the party. Had a buffet that was exceptionally good.
90% of the boaters at this marina are Canadian.