The Welland Canal

We're off again - this time we're on our way to Georgian Bay and we're traveling with our friends Karen and Warren Goodyear on their sailboat, Sandcastle.

They call the doors in this lock "The King Kong Doors"

On Thursday morning we left the club and headed across the lake to Port Weller. We’d been instructed to tie up for the night on the wall just outside the first lock in the Welland canal.  Since pleasure craft are required to have three persons for the ascent through the Welland, Bob had arranged for two “helpers” to meet us there on Friday morning, one to accompany us on Sea Change and one for the Goodyears on Sandcastle.  We were up at 4:45 am to be ready for a 5:30 start but a slow moving commercial vessel going through the locks backed up our departure and we didn’t start through the first lock until 6:30. And so began a long slow day.  Having experienced hands aboard made the whole process seem almost easy.  In spite of the turbulent water in the rapidly filling gargantuan locks, as long as we followed instructions and did our bit, the boats stayed more or less in place, near the lock wall but not grinding into it. 

Our relief at the ease of our passage was replaced by boredom as we sat and waited for commercial traffic ahead of or behind us. We were pulled out of the procession twice and asked to tie up and let freighters lock through.  These huge ginormous vessels could barely fit into the locks and from our vantage point, tied up just outside the locks, there appeared to be a hair’s breadth between ship and lock walls.  They were slow to enter and slow to exit.  Each time we paused to tie up at the side of the canal, we sat for close to 2 hours – and so, in spite of our early start, it was 7:30 that evening when we pulled out of lock 8 and rounded the corner to tie up at the municipal locks in Port Colbourne on Lake Erie.  It turns out that we were fortunate not to have had an even longer day.  Yesterday, we were talking to another sailor who started early in the morning on his way through the Welland and didn’t finish until 1 a.m. the next morning!