Thousand Islands Club to Cornwall, Ontario

 Wednesday, July 26 -- Thousand Islands Club to Cornwall -- 94 miles and 3 locks

Today was all about working through the big commercial locks on the St. Lawrence Seaway. There are seven locks all together, five on the Canadian side and two on the American side. The locks on both sides are focused on commercial traffic, with pleasure boaters a distant second priority. For the Canadian locks pleasure boaters need to make reservations and pay in advance on line ($25 CAD per lock), while the US locks have no set schedule and you pay in cash when you arrive ($30 USD per lock). The Captain was nervous about getting all this right. We booked the first lock -- the Iroquois Lock on the Canadian side -- for this afternoon, and figured we'd do the two American locks (which are just 3 miles apart and start 30 miles downstream of the Iroquois Lock) as soon as we could afterwards, but hopefully not too late. We scheduled the next four Canadian locks for Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, having been warned by many people that it is very risky to try and do them all in one day.

Our scheduled time for the Iroquois Lock was 4pm, but we showed up at 1:30 hoping we might get through early. That in fact happened, but first we had to wait for a downbound freighter to arrive and lock through, which took an hour. The freighter was the NACC Quebec -- a cement carrier -- which we had passed on the way to the Iroquois Lock, and would pass again on the way to the US locks. When it was our turn to go through the Iroquois Lock they just waved us through because there was no elevation drop. Apparently this lock is more for seasonal use when the water is high in the spring. (We did not ask for a refund.)

The Captain was now thinking we were sitting pretty, since we had made it through the first lock an hour-and-a-half ahead of our scheduled 4pm passage. But we lost this time and more when we got to the first American lock (the Eisenhower) and had to wait again for the NACC Quebec to show up and lock through. There was a 40' drop at the Eisenhower Lock and it took a long time for the NACC Quebec to lock through. In the meantime we tied up at a rickety floating dock just upstream of the lock. There was no room for the next pleasure boat to tie up when it showed up about half an hour later, so we let them tie up against us. It was a bit after six by the time we both entered the Eisenhower Lock. Fortunately, the next lock (the Snell Lock) was ready to go when we reached it and we made its 45' drop pretty quickly. (The Eisenhower name is obvious given that the St. Lawrence Seaway was built in the 1950s, but Snell name not so much. Look him up on Wikipedia -- Bertrand Snell.) The crew at all of the locks were nice enough, but it was very different being second-class citizens compared to our experience on the Erie Canal, where there were very few occasions when we had to wait.

After the Snell Lock we had another ten miles to get to the marina in Cornwall where we had a reservation, and it was 7:45 by the time we tied up. We were both tired and hungry and immediately headed into town to see what we could find for a drink and dinner that would still be open. We were very lucky to stumble on a place called the Birchwood Restaurant & Bar, which turned out to be a very nice foodie place with a full bar. It made for an excellent ending to what had been a long and somewhat stressful day. 

Besides the stress and hassle of managing the locks, there were some interesting sights along the way, including nice lighthouses in the stretch of the river immediately after Alexandria Bay,

the Canadian Coast Guard station at Prescott, Ontario, 

the Algoma Innovator (which really needs a paint job) loading stone at Johnstown, Ontario, 

a lovely riverfront farm and the campus of the Operating Engineers Training Institute of Ontario (their website explains what they are about) -- both near Morrisburg, Ontario,

the CSL Welland running empty upbound near Cornwell (the other Canadian Steamship Lines freighter that we saw back at the Soo also sported a very nice sports mural on the front of its cabin structure),

and finally, as an offset to all the fancy cottages that we saw in the Thousand Islands, this tiny island just downstream of Cornwall that was packed with trailers. Not sure how they get them on and off this island, but people were clearly living in them.