Another early start (since the trains woke us up anyway!) as it was a planned 40 mile day through the Canal de la Rive Sud on the St. Lawrence Seaway – two locks to get through. Basically though the commercial traffic (large freighters!) have priority so following the guidebook suggestions, we allowed 3 – 5 hours wait time to get through these two locks. The route to the canal however was very confusing – even with a GPS as the lake near Montreal is very shallow so it took a bit longer to get there than we expected. The start of the day was to pass through the original lock walls of the first lock built here at St Anne's. From there it got worse! The angle of the sun made it very difficult to actually see the buoys – we just trusted that the GPS was telling us the right thing. A high speed ferry passed us on our way – you can see Montreal in the background.
Our luck at the first lock was running too good to be true: pulled up to the first lock as a freighter was leaving and pleasure craft were just entering! How easy! Down 30 feet and on the the next one – at which we waited for an hour and a half. Not too bad really. I think it was lunchtime for the lock personnel so they shut the lock for an hour as nothing was going on! Fun roller coaster on the south end of Montreal.
Steve took this picture standing on the balcony of the restaurant at our marina. You can see the St. Lawrence Seaway and on the other side of it is Montreal. We couldn't go to the marina in old town Montreal because the current of 6 knots is too much for us to handle going upstream (we can barely go 6 knots). So we'll enjoy Montreal from a distance. Ok with us – still way too hot to be out and about in the city. We think the structure in the second picture is something leftover from the Olympics that were held in Montreal in 1976 (??). Maybe the ski jump??? Anyway, it was a fun thing.
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