The Rideau Canal, Ottawa to Kingston, Ontario

We are finding it hard to leave many of these wonderful places. We really enjoyed Ottawa but again it is time to move on.

The Rideau Canal is pronounced Re like repeat and dough like bread dough. Again we are always impressed with the natural beauty of Canada. We have found the people to be very happy and friendly. Everyone we encountered has been more than willing to help us with directions, restaurant recommendations or whatever else we needed.

The Rideau consists of many more of the heritage locks taking us from one level to the next and from lake to river, etc. They are almost all hand operated and were built in the 1800's. A new experience was the swing bridges at several of the locks that are also manually operated. I continue to be amazed with the engineering from that long ago. Parks Canada has these facilities in excellent condition and their staff continues to be extremely friendly and helpful.

Most of the locks are staffed by one lockmaster, who is a full time employee, and several summer helpers who are usually university students. We enjoyed talking to many of them and hearing their dreams and future plans. They all seemed to love their jobs. They liked to hear about our trip and sometimes our political views. Most of them have interesting views about the U S politics and fiscal policies. Our national debt was a huge concern of most of them.

How beautiful is this?

The pool between two locks in Merrickville, Ontario.

The building is the lockmasters' office.

This is the water flowing downstream from the hydro electric plant.
This stream is parallel to the locks.

The Canadian beauty is outstanding!

After locking through the last lock we wanted to stay overnight at Merrickville in the pond.

The lock attendants though it was full for the night.

The lockmaster walked over and made another boat move up to make room for us. How nice of him!

We later found out that the other boat wasn't using and paying for hydro and the lockmaster knew we wanted hydro, which is electricity in Canada. It was only ten dollars but I guess it made a difference.

They try really hard to accommodate everyone.

Here the boat is actually above the road level because of the dike alongside the road. We were  right next to the dam and had that lulling sound all night.


Below are some well preserved buildings in Merrickville

This house was originally a lockmasters house built in 1865.



This building is currently a bakery.

This was our first experience having a manual bridge opened for us after they opened the lock doors.

The girl in the center of the bridge is actually manually opening the bridge.

After inserting that crank handle in the middle of the bridge she walks in circles cranking the bridge open.

It looks like she is waiting for something but she really is walking in circles cranking the bridge open for us.

Here she is on the other side of the circle.



Here is the Canadian family again that we locked through with many times.
A very nice 45' wood boat.



I don't think this cow appreciates the beautiful scenery like we do.



This is the Westport, Ontario post office.
It is styled to resemble the Parliament building in Ottawa.




These boat houses remind me of Red Wing, MN.



The moon over Navigator in Westport.



Westport was a stop for a jet ski poker run.
Here they come to get their token from the people on the end of the dock.



There were around fifty jet skis in the poker run.



It was quite orderly. A few jet skis had go pro cameras on them.



This is the first lock that we are going down in the Rideau toward Lake Ontario.



Because we are now going downstream the aids to navigation change sides here.
Until this lock we were going up stream and red was on our right.
We need to constantly vigilant to stay on the correct side of the markers,
especially in Canada because the rocks outside the channel are unforgiving.



It was raining quite hard when we arrived at this lock and we waited to lock through
for the rain to subside.
The rain didn't dampen our spirits though.

There is another manual bridge to open here.

The rain stopped and it was quite a nice day.

We always have to go between the red and green markers.

Here we also had to make a sharp turn to starboard. Very narrow!

This was one of the most beautiful spots we traveled through.

This time we were traveling down in these step locks which made it much more scenic.

When you travel up, you are looking at the upper doors and when you are high enough

 to see behind, its time to move forward and out of the lock.

The netting above is under a railroad bridge. A long and fast train crossed while we were in the lock.

It was really noisy!

Until next time - Kingston, Ontario.