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.

Mountains in the background. Beautiful setting here.

End of blog for 2009. See you in June of 2010. Ray and Deb

Week 14, Sept. 9-13

The previous post we were leaving Ottawa. There are two locks on the Ottawa River between Ottawa and Montreal. Here we are arriving at the second lock, St. Anne de Bellevue. From here we are about 10 miles west of the heart of Montreal. This is where the Ottawa River meets the St. Lawrence River. On the other side of this lock, the St. Lawrence River is about a mile and a half wide and very shallow. It's actually called Lake St. Louis. From this lock, there are two ways to get to the heart of Montreal, which is called Old Montreal. For small boats, you can take the Lachine Canal which has a height restriction of 8 feet. Larger boats must zig-zag back and forth through shallow Lake St. Louis following an extensive buoy route to the shipping channel of the St. Lawrence River. Once in the shipping channel, you must lock through two large shipping channel locks, St. Catherine and Lambert, that take you to Old Montreal. Even though it's only 10 miles from here to the heart of Montreal, we traveled 25 miles and it took us all day to get there.

We spotted this freighter in the shipping channel while we were maneuvering through Lake St. Louis. We caught up to it and followed it to the St. Catherine Lock. We had heard it can take as much as four hours to lock through the commercial shipping locks on the St. Lawrence because of commercial traffic.

I pulled up to the pleasure boat dock at the St. Catherine Lock as the freighter was pulling into the lock. We had to tie up here, get off the boat and check in via intercom phone to get our locking instructions. I thought they might put us in with him, saving us time. As the freighter past, 75 feet to our left, his prop sucked water from around us and pulled us into the dock popping the fenders up onto the dock, putting several deep scratches in the hull. Lessen learned- stay away from freighters. No they didn't let us lock with him. We had to wait an hour and a half.

Entering the St. Catherine Lock.

Leaving the St. Catherine Lock.

This is what the shipping channel looks like. It arcs around the southern side of Montreal. Next stop the Lambert Lock.

Lambert Lock.

If you look close, you can see four red lights on the tower. The red lights mean "Stop - Do Not Enter." Next, there are four amber lights. They count down in one minute increments. Amber light #4 will flash for one minute, go out and amber light #3 starts flashing, and so on. When the green light comes on, they are ready for you to enter.

To the left in this picture is a 40 foot SeaRay that is tied at the pleasure boat dock waiting to lock through.

This is the Montreal skyline and where the St. Lawrence shipping channel meets the main St. Lawrence River.

When we turned left to head upstream to Old Montreal, there was a very fast current, 6 to 7 knots. I was operating the boat at a normal 10 knot cruise speed and going 3 knots.

To the far right, you can see the still water out of the current. The marina where we stayed Port D-Escale, is up this calm water about a mile.

This is the same boat we saw at Burritts Rapids on the Rideau Canal.

This is Port D-Escale where we stayed.

Had to mount my satellite dish on the hardtop to get the signal over the wall for reception.

This marina, Port D-Escale, was once a commercial shipping dock that has been converted to a marina.

Across the street from the marina is Old Montreal.

One street over is this street with old cobblestone.

Many shops and restaurants on this street.

While we were in Montreal, we rented a car and drove 100 miles north to a lumbermill, Eco-Cedre at St. Donat, Quebec. They specialize in northeastern white cedar. I am looking for a source for clear boards (no knots) to build a lapstrake dinghy. Had a nice conversation with the owner, Paul Foster. He has turned down other requests, but he said he would supply me because we had made the effort to visit the sawmill.

This is a Norwegian Cruise Lines ship that cruises between Montreal and Boston. It left for Boston while we were there.

The boating season is about over. The next new post after this one will be our last for this year.