Windsong to the Sea - Part 3 - Welland to Montreal

I awoke bright and early ready to transit the Welland Canal. Allen Shearn had warned me that the cost of transiting the canal had gone up and that they only accepted cash. Fortunately, the Morlan Marina had a cash machine. I went to get cash before my crew arrived only to discover that the cash machine was broken! Thank goodness for cell phones. I called my crew and asked them to bring me cash.

My ex-girlfriend Angela and her friend Greg arrived with cash in hand and we left the dock at 9 am. We waited two hours at lock 8 (the locks are numbered from the bottom up) while the Beluga Formation locked up. Once we were in lock 8 it took only about six hours to lock through. The process was pretty simple. You motored in until you were told to stop, approached the wall, and were handed two 100 foot long 5/8 yellow poly propylene lines: one for the bow and one for the stern. The bowman and stern man each ran their line around a cleat and eased it off while the third person stood amidships with a boat hook and fended as we were lowered 40 to 50 feet. I just used my regular fenders along with two small fender boards. I don’t think the fender boards every came into play.

The most interesting point was where the locks were twinned. At one point I was behind Windsong’s helm looking down into the bridge deck of an upbound freighter! We had all but the last two locks to ourselves. We locked through the last two along with a 50 foot power yacht.

By 5 pm Windsong was floating in a nearly calm Lake Ontario. She had now sailed on all five Great Lakes! We motored to Niagara on the Lake and tied up at the Lake Niagara on the Lake Sailing Club, founded by none other than George Hinterholler. Hinterholler designed the Shark and was in charge of production at C&C when Windsong was built. Greg’s parents met us there and took us out to dinner at the Angel Inn, the oldest pub in Upper Canada.

Greg left us that night and Angela and I continued on to Toronto the next morning. Winds were dead calm and were to remain that way for three days of scorching 30^oC heat. The skyline of Toronto emerged from the mist about halfway across the lake. We tied up to the public wall on Toronto Island and visited the Gibralter Point lighthouse. Built in 1908, it is the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Great Lakes. From there we played planes, trains, and automobiles as we took the ferry to the city, the streetcar and subway to Angela’s apartment, then her car to her brother Fil’s in Mississauga for dinner.

After a peaceful evening looking across the harbour at Toronto, we motored through the calm to Cobourg where were able to anchor for the first time since Rondeau Bay. We met a couple at the gas dock who also owned a C&C 30. They recommended a dinner restaurant, a breakfast restaurant, and an ice cream parlour. We partook in all three.

Our third day of motoring in the calm took us through the Murray Canal and into the Bay of Quinte. Where we anchored for the night at Grassy Point a watched a beautiful sunset.

For our last stretch to Kingston, the wind returned and Windsong was able to sail out of the Great Lakes and into the St. Lawrence. We tied up in the Confederation Basin. Directly astern was a Martello tower, part of the city’s battlements. You could imagine being inside that tower heaving away as you practised with the great guns in preparation for the epic battle that never came. We had dinner at Chez Piggy, a restaurant in ancient stone barn that dated back to the same era as the Martello tower. The food was far better than the name!

Angela disembarked to go to a wedding in Ottawa and I planned to do some diving for the day since Kingston has some of the best shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. Luck was against me. The long calm that would have been perfect for diving was over and the strong SW winds kept the dive boats from running. That same wind was ideal for driving me down the St. Lawrence. I unfurled my sails, broad reached, and ran clear through the Thousand Islands. Literally a thousand lumps of pink granite topped with white and jack pines with a house or cottage on nearly every one. Some islands were so small that they were diked all the way around to keep the cottages from washing away. For every island there must have been ten boats. It was the busiest traffic I had seen besides Toronto Harbour. I anchored for the night behind Skelton Island, one of the last in the chain just upstream of Brockville. I couldn’t help but wonder about the name of the island. Was there some dark a clouded history to it? Did the name once have another ‘e’?

When I awoke at 07:00 I had to put on a sweater for the first time in the entire trip. Today I was to enter the St. Lawrence Seaway locks. At the Iroquois, the first lock, I found that, like the Welland Canal, the credit card machine was shut down and the fee increased to $25 cash. That seemed awfully convenient. The lockkeeper gave me heck for entering the locks single handed. I knew that it would take some creativity, but for his lock it was irrelevant. The drop was only three feet and you didn’t even need to tie up. I sailed most of the day passing Chrysler’s Farm and Upper Canada Village. We had a couple of family reunions at Upper Canada Village when I was a kid. It is something similar to Greenfield Village in Detroit. It is made up of buildings that were salvaged from the towns that were flooded during the creation of the Seaway, and is populated by historical re-enactors.. I had never realized that Chrysler’s farm was right next door. I guess when you are having a reunion with your American relatives, it is best not to emphasise major battles from the War of 1812.

The next set of locks were the American Eisenhower and Snellen locks. They were very easy to single hand through. They had a floating bollard system that consisted of a large steel buoy with a bollard on it, set into a recess in the wall. You simply tied up and road down. The fee system was not so convenient. I discovered that I had the American and Canadian fees mixed up. The fee was $60 not $50 and cash only. I had $55. They re-opened the lock and kicked me out. I had to cross the river through a series of islands to the town of Long Sault to find a cash machine. I consoled myself in the fact that it was actually a very pretty area and this was the first real set back I had encountered in almost 600 miles. Two hours later I was finally able to lock through. I anchored for the night in the reeds near Ile Dodens about 7 miles downstream of Cornwall.

I awoke the next morning to the sound of water fowl. One bird landed on the deck directly above the shelf where I put my glasses at night. I could hear it clicking away on the deck over my bunk. "Ah, how serene! I just hope it doesn’t make a mess on the deck." I dosed off for a while then reached for my glasses. There had been no bird. The clicking had been Spot, the ship’s cat, playing with my glasses. They were now nowhere to be found. Several minutes of groping around like Velma from Scooby Doo revealed them buried undamaged on the other side of the bunk.

With my sight restored I weighed anchor and headed for the Beauharnois locks. How was I going to pull this one off? The procedure would be the same as the Welland Canal: two people tending lines and one person fending. In a pinch you could tend a line and fend at the same time. That still required two people, and Spot isn’t much of a line handler. The solution proved very easy: I locked through in a raft of 19 boats. It looked like a giant rafting party in the swimming hole off of South Port, complete with powerboat chicks in bikinis! It was in this raft that I met Barry and his wife Yvonne aboard their gorgeous 1940's vintage ketch Calypso. I rafted off of them to get through the Cote-Sainte Catherine and Saint-Lambert locks as well.

The Saint-Lambert lock released me 30 feet above sea level and a half mile downstream of the Old Port of Montreal. Both Angela and I had decided that the Old Port was the best place to meet in Montreal. The problem was that the cruising guide said I would have to battle the five knot current to get up there. I’ve read about the "six knot currents" in the Detroit River and I knew that authors were prone to exaggeration when it comes to currents. I did however take to heart the advice to hug the commercial docks and use their stepped shape to help avoid the current.

I crossed the river and pointed Windsong’s nose into the current. With the knotmeter reading six knots through the water, the GPS told me I was making about one knot over the bottom. The cruising guide was not exaggerating! Last spring, Al Finch and I installed Max, my Universal M25XP diesel. Now it was time to find out what she would do. I opened the throttle wide and steered as close to the wall as I dared with the standing waves of the torrent all around me. I crept along for about a thousand feet before I neared the first step that protruded about 100 feet out into the current. As I approached the step the current began to decrease and I surged forward at six knots true. The sooner I turned, the more current I would have to battle. It became a game of chicken with a 30 foot high concrete wall! I veered at the last second and plunged into barricade of rushing water. In the collision of Windsong’s speed and the oncoming water the knotmeter jumped well past seven knots. The process repeated a dozen times as my knuckles grew whiter and whiter.

Finally, I entered the calm waters of the Old Port where I found Angela and her friend Sharon waiting for me. I looked around and discovered that the only other sailboat in the harbour was a MacGregor, the lamentable sailboat/powerboat hybrid! It was no wonder: few sailboats could have made it through that current. Windsong never would have made it with her old Atomic Four!