Day 68: Port Dalhousie to Port Colborne

The famous Welland Canal. Since the Niagara River drains the Great Lakes over the escarpment and down into Lake Ontario, and since we can't navigate the Niagara Falls, we must climb up into Lake Erie via the Welland Canal and a series of 8 Locks. Preston has warned us that we’ll be sharing this ditch with full-size Laker and ocean-going vessels, that they will receive preference and that it will take all day to negotiate this waterway, and so it proves. He also advises that we’ll be ascending to Lake Erie in company with 6 other motor vessels.

We’re away from the little Port of Dalhousie soon after 0700 for the 30-min run over to the northern canal opening. We pick up a local who knows the Welland and all of the processes intimately and await a down-bound freighter to emerge from Lock No. 1. We tie up to the wall, and while we stooge around, our ‘pilot’ gets together with several others as well as a clutch of delivery captains (professionals, who move boats around within the US and Canada for private clients) and they work out the order and arrangement by which we’ll enter the Locks. Because 45 North is heavy (around 95,000 lbs), it’s decided that we’ll be early in the queue and will be against the Lock wall. Another motor yacht will ‘raft’ up against us, and the other vessels will do the same in order to get 7 boats into each Lock at the same time. This dance is repeated each time we move along to the next Lock.

Each year, a clutch of university students are given summer jobs on the Welland, handling the lines. This entails them (we had a group of 3 young ladies, all with hard-hats) dropping two ropes to each boat which are then held fast by crew on the boat nearest the wall until we rise to the top, where the ropes are thrown back onto the dock. The ladies then jump into a vehicle and drive (sometimes they only have to walk) to the next Lock to repeat the process. On our boat, Bob, our local pilot handled the forward line and Graeme and I looked after the stern, which included making sure the fenders (‘freddies’, Graeme calls them) don’t get caught up in various concrete abnormalities as they slid up the Lock wall. We were fortunate on a couple of occasions to be able to cross down-bound freighters in double Locks, where they were in one Lock while we were beside them in a separate one. This greatly facilitated our progress, although waiting for road and rail bridges to be lifter added to our elapsed time in the canal.

We were finally through the last Lock (which really only evened up the canal level at the southern end a couple of feet with Lake Erie) and able to motor around a semi-derelict grain terminal and into the Sugarloaf Harbour Marina at around 1800… a 12-hr day for us all. Dinner was taken in the pub-food Whiskey & Walleye marina restaurant only a short walk away. There was a bit of rain around.Read more