Leg #10 — 8/3/14 to 8/12/14 — Belleville, Ontario to Bobcaygeon, Ontario

We took off dri­ving to the boat at 4am on Sun­day, 8/3/14, and instead of get­ting to the boat and head­ing to Tren­ton tonight, we decided to stop in Tren­ton to eat and pro­vi­sion.  We had fish and chips at Cap­tain George’s, walked around a bit, hit the Metro and headed to Belleville.  We chat­ted with old and new boat neighbors…always great local advice.
In the morn­ing, we headed out at 7:30am and headed up for our first day on the Trent-Severn Waterway–240 miles with 44 locks, all dif­fer­ent vari­eties of lift/lower heights, and 46 bridges.  Any that any boat under 22 feet in height can travel under the fixed bridges on this leg and the fixed bridges are moved out the way in a vari­ety of ways. Most of the locks are man­ual with a few newer mechan­i­cal lifts.  This water­way will include many small and inter­est­ing towns along the way.  We will take it in two legs:  Belleville to Bob­cay­geon and then Bob­cay­geon to Port Sev­ern and the Geor­gian Bay.  http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/on/trentsevern/index.aspx

We exited the Bay of Quinte , a long arm of Lake Ontario, and entered the Trent River, pass­ing under a bridge that pro­claimed it the “Gate­way to the Trent-Severn Water­way”. . This water­way was opened in 1920 after nearly 87 years of construction.

The Trent-Severn Water­way sys­tem links Lake Ontario (at Tren­ton) with Lake HURON (at Port Sev­ern on GEORGIAN BAY). The water route (386 km long) uti­lizes the Trent River to Rice Lake, the Oton­abee River, the KAWARTHA LAKES, con­structed chan­nels to lakes Sim­coe and Couch­ich­ing, and the Sev­ern River to Geor­gian Bay. The water­way con­sists of 44 locks, some 75 con­trol dams, 15 swing bridges and 2 marine rail­ways (at Big Chute). Two of the locks, at Peter­bor­ough and Kirk­field, are hydraulic-lift locks, which are unique in North Amer­ica and among the high­est in the world. Locks over­come a rise of 182 m to the sum­mit at Bal­sam Lake and then a drop of 80 m to Lake Huron.Early set­tlers con­structed sim­ple con­nec­tions between some lakes to facil­i­tate the float­ing of tim­ber cut from nearby forests. Log­ging, milling, steam­boat­ing, grain han­dling and recre­ation were all linked to the devel­op­ment of the water­way. Work was spo­radic and cov­ered 87 years from 1833 to 1920. The length of time it took to com­plete the water­way indi­cates the reluc­tance of the var­i­ous lev­els of gov­ern­ment (British, colo­nial, provin­cial and fed­eral) to build it. The water­way under­went a major mod­ern­iza­tion and recon­struc­tion pro­gram in the 1960s, but some sec­tions of the water­way remain largely unchanged from when they were first built.Now under Her­itage Canada, Parks Canada (since 1972), the water­way is used every sum­mer for boat­ing. It also plays a role in pro­vid­ing water for munic­i­pal sup­plies, hydroelectric-power gen­er­a­tion, wildlife-habitat pro­tec­tion and flood control.

Crate’s Marina

Leav­ing Belleville, Ontario

 

Today we hit locks 1thru 6 and stopped for a break in Frank­ford.  Each lock has a sign with the name of the lock and num­ber.  We always have our lists with names of Locks and bridges, miles in between, lock lift, etc.  We trav­eled all morn­ing with only one other boat, Rick and Jamie from The Com­pro­mise, through all these locks which makes it very sim­ple.  The rules for these locks is to tie to the blue line and when the lock is ready they will open the door and go in and tie to what­ever side they yell down at you.  If they don’t spec­ify, the first boat in just picks a side.  Once we started, all the locks in front of us were ready for us to go on in when we got there mak­ing it very fast.  In Frank­ford, we had lunch at Dimitri’s across the river.  It started rain­ing dur­ing lunch and, since we left the fly bridge open, we hur­ried back to grab our elec­tron­ics before they got too wet.  We ended up head­ing out and didn’t walk around town.

The Lock­mas­ter, Kevin, at Glen Ross Lock rec­om­mended the ice cream at their upper lock wall so, of course, we tied up and obliged. Richard and Donna’s lit­tle con­ve­nience store with huge $2.00 ice cream.  Suess’ needed to be on this leg. The two flight locks at Ran­ney Falls total 48 ft.…..HUGH doors with lots of tur­bu­lence.  Whew !  Long but good and easy day.  12 Locks, about 40 miles and we went up 234 ft.  Also, check out the pic­ture of the sus­pen­sion walk­way bridge.  Luck­ily, it’s too far for us to come back and walk across.

Big Dou­ble Flight Lock Ahead

Big Doors to First of Two Locks

Sus­pen­sion Walk­way Bridge

Big door clos­ing behind us

Big doors open­ing for us

We tied to the town wall in Cam­bell­ford, Ontario, next to the large Tooney.  A Tooney is worth 2 Looney.  A Looney is a $1.00 coin.  It is a bi-metal coin so that you are able to eas­ily rec­og­nize it and it’s been around since 1996 so maybe it will stay.  We had din­ner at the Stink­ing Rose, craft beer and bar food.

The next morn­ing we made a list of all of the “must do’s” in Cam­bell­ford.  We first had break­fast at Be My Guest, bought pas­tries at Dooher’s Bak­ery, and then found The But­ter Tart Fac­tory.  We had our first but­ter tart in Belleville at the Mar­ket but this place had about 12 dif­fer­ent fla­vors.  Those who know us will real­ize that we couldn’t just try one fla­vor.

Choco­late and cheese are also on the Cam­bell­ford list.  We walked to the choco­late out­let but were told that the cheese was 3, then 5 kilo­me­ters away…to far too walk today.  Back to the boat to relax for the after­noon. Ken decided that we would like to take the dinghy down to the area of the sus­pen­sion bridge so he got it ready.  When he found out that we didn’t have enough gas, he went on a hunt.  He finally took the dinghy up a 1/2 mile north and climbed up on land and filled the tank.  He then couldn’t get the engine started and had to “row” back to SSIII.  I was watch­ing him with the big lens on the cam­era but for­got to take a pic­ture of him return­ing. If any­one has tried row­ing, it is a lot more dif­fi­cult that it looks espe­cially when there is no seat in the dinghy. The river was run­ning very fast dur­ing the early hours but stopped abruptly around 2:00am.  I am going to check if the damns let water loose on a reg­u­lar basis.

This is how still it was in the morn­ing. The next morn­ing, we dinghy’d down toward the last lock to get a bet­ter look at “the bridge” but couldn’t see it in the time allot­ted.  We need to be at the Lock 13 at 9:00 when then opened.  I had Ken drop me at the lock and I walked back to the boat. We were going to travel withe The Com­pro­mise again today and were joined by two other boats through the locks through Healey Falls were the faster boats will take off for the next 13 miles to Hast­ings.

Aproach to Cam­bell­ford Lock

The Com­pro­mise com­ing in.

The excite­ment hap­pened in Lock 15 !   All four boats were tied in the Lock when the water started explod­ing over the upper lock doors.  I think we all thought we were doomed.  Evi­dently, it was the norm in this lock since Lock 16 and 17 were only 500maway and the water rushed when they low­ered that level.  Here are pic­tures of the nor­mal and the wild. We arrived at the bot­tom of the Scotts Mill Lock and tied up.  We quickly gath­ered our stuff and headed in to Peter­bor­ough to lis­ten to their Wednes­day night musicfest.  We had pretty good burg­ers and fries on the lawn while enjoy­ing Bar­ney Ben­tell of the 80’s group Bar­ney Ben­tell and the Leg­endary Hearts. The locals appeared to remem­ber him and still fol­low his music.  Back to the boat in the pitch dark and down and out !

I made my early morn­ing walk in to town and back before the lock staff appeared.  We let them know that we wanted locked thru.  We went into Peter­bor­ough Marina first for fuel and a pumpout then off to our slip on the T head.  Rick from The Com­pro­mise came walk­ing down the dock to say hello.  I also ran into Carol from Reunion com­ing out of the laun­dry.  I had been talk­ing to her via email for the last few days keep­ing track of them in front of us.  After some catch­ing up with Rick and Jamie, they headed out to go toward their home near Bob­cay­geon. We walked down­town for nice lunch at Riley’s rooftop ter­race, then a nice long walk around town.  We relaxed back at the boat and read, hit the Peter­bor­ough Art Gallery, and had din­ner at Hot Belly Momma’s…a very nice relax­ing day. We left for Lock 20 before 9:00am and locked thru with a small house­boat and a cruiser from Ottawa, Moody Waters.  On to the famous Peter­bor­ough Lift Lock.  My video didn’t sur­vive so I am attach­ing some­one else’s Youtube so that you can see the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nV1SzodWeI

Approach­ing lock 21, the Peter­bor­ough Lift Lock. Com­pleted in 1904, this is the high­est hydraulic lift lock in the world and was an engi­neer­ing mar­vel at the time. It has oper­ated con­tin­u­ously for 110 years with no major changes to its func­tion­ing or engi­neer­ing. Each of the two pans weighs 1300 tons when filled with water. With one pan up and the other down, the two bal­ance each other. It does not mat­ter how many boats are in either pan. A boat dis­places it’s own weight in water. When it is time to lower one pan and raise the other, one extra foot of water (130 tons) is allowed to enter the upper pan. This extra weight allows the upper pan to push down and raise the lower pan to the top level. The two pans are locked in place and the extra water is let out of the lower pan. Boats enter and exit the upper and lower pans and the process is repeated.

Com­ing up to the Liftlock

House­boat tied up

Dri­ving into the pan.

Moody Waters tied beside us

View as we are rising

The other pan decend­ing while we ascend

We headed on down the river and still hadn’t decided where to spend the night.

We stopped in Lake­field, Lock 26, for lunch.  We had an extremely nice lunch at the River­house Com­pany Restau­rant just across the water at the bridge.  We then walked the short dis­tance into and around the lit­tle town, found ice cream in the salty caramel vari­ety, and headed back to the boat.  Reunion was tied up at the lock wall when we got back. We headed out and hit locks 27 thru 31 and ended up for the night at Buck­horn Lock on the down wall.  We had a nice fam­ily that was camp­ing nearby with their girls catch our lines for us.

Katie and Jessie on Louise

Caught up with us at Buckhorn

A lot of peo­ple camp and hang out at these walls.  They are very beau­ti­ful and gen­er­ally quiet areas right next to water.  Can’t beat that.

We walked up the road and ate at the Ice House.…nothing to write about there.  In the morn­ing we went on the hunt for the bak­ery Ken heard was nearby and came back with rolls and a few more but­ter tarts. We ate eggs and rolls on the boat for break­fast.  Ken got the dinghy ready for a trip to a nearby gallery “Gallery on the Water”.….a group­ing of Cana­dian artists.  We took the dinghy over to the Gallery and it was a extremely large and good dis­play of Cana­dian artists.  The gallery build­ing itself sits right on the water.

The area is a new look with the rounded rock formations.

Off we go thru Lock 31 around 11:30am.  We are head­ing to the lock at Bob­cay­geon and hope­fully can tie to a wall to visit the town before leav­ing the boat at Birch Marina for sev­eral weeks.  Well, as good as our travel plans have been so far, today was the end of that.  This lock area was extremely crowded which is the first that we have seen on this trip. Besides the reg­u­lar small and large plea­sure boats, there are a large num­ber of house­boats in this region and at this lock. There are also a hun­dreds of tourists hang­ing around the area to watch the boats travel through the lock.  The count for this Sat­ur­day was 162 boats trav­el­ing through this lock between 9:00am and 7:00pm.

There was no room on either the lower or upper wall at Lock 32 so we were going to head over to Birch Bay Marina.  After call­ing them, we found out that we didn’t have a spot that day and wouldn’tfor a cou­ple of days either.  We hung around in the lake try­ing to come with an alter­nate plan.  We called a cou­ple of local mari­nas to no luck but ended up with a spot back out through the lock and north to Kawartha Lakes Marina.  The boat neigh­bors and staff were friendly and help­ful with sug­ges­tions of how and where to leave the boat.  We ended up get­ting a slip at Cen­tre Point Land­ing back through the lock.  We went to town, about 4 miles in the dinghy, and walked to check out the marina early the next morn­ing.  We met a cou­ple in the marina who would like to do the Loop in the future and had a nice con­ver­sa­tion with them.  They gave us a ride back to the dinghy.  We went back to the boat and headed out to get a spot on the lock wall for the day and overnight. I walked.…and walked…to see an art show at the Kawartha’s Set­tlers Vil­lage and checked the loca­tion of the Kawartha Ice Cream/Dairy on the way back. We shopped a bit and ate a cou­ple of meals but on Sun­day night the place turned back into a nice quiet com­mu­nity.  After break­fast on Mon­day morn­ing, Ken took a bus to the car rental and came back with our travel home car.  I spent the day clean­ing and after we took the boat back through the lock and tied up at Cen­tre Point, we gath­ered all our stuff in the car and headed for home.