Mer Sea

We had an uneventful (always what you want in a boat!) crossing of Lake Ontario – in fact it was eerily calm – but no complaints here! The sky was overcast, but there was no wind or wave action to speak of. We arrived at the marina in Cape Vincent, NY, after trying repeatedly to raise them on the radio and telephone, all without success. We were able to locate the marina, and we pulled up to the fuel dock (this is our new strategy when a marina is unreachable by telecommunications), where a kind stranger, not part of the marina, helped us with our lines. We spoke to the marina operator, and quickly determined that we’d be just as well off at the town docks, and for free, no less!

 

We retraced our steps along the breakwall in front of town, and tied up at the free town dock. There was a couple there that was just leaving, and we asked them if there was anything they could recommend to do or see while in town. They were not very encouraging, and said they were leaving to go back to Sackets Harbor, where there was lots to do and see! We found this somewhat discouraging, but weren’t prepared to go backwards, so determined to stay and make the best of it. We did call John and Betty, on KatieSue, who were in Sackets Harbor, and give them the report. They had been planning to join us in Cape Vincent, but might want to change their minds…

 

Well, John and Betty decided to join us after all, and I explored the town while we waited for them. Actually, it’s one of those charming, unfortunately no longer-so-prosperous towns, of which we’ve seen many in our travels thus far. There are some really lovely old homes, lots of beautiful gardens, and a little downtown area with a well-supplied grocery, little shops, and many little pizza-type restaurants and pubs. On the outskirts, I even found an open liquor store (on a Sunday!) and a great-looking fine dining type of restaurant! Not so shabby, after all! It’s a vacation town that is probably past its heyday, but still plenty nice enough. And the people are universally friendly.

 

We had delicious margaritas with John and Betty in the evening – courtesy of John, who had promised us a sample of his world-famous recipe. Boy, was that a good margarita! We felt a little sad, because KatieSue and we would be parting company the next day, as they are taking a somewhat different route, but we hope to meet up in Georgian Bay later in the loop!

 

Monday morning we helped John and Betty cast off, then headed out ourselves for our first stop in Canada. Throughout this portion of the trip, down the St. Lawrence, we’d be staying in marinas, and I’d lined them up all the way to Montreal. From Cape Vincent to Morrisburg we’d be in the area called the Thousand Islands, reputed to have spectacular scenery and many wonderful anchorages. A real exploration of this area will have to come at another time for us, as we needed to keep moving towards Montreal to get through the northern part of our loop before the winter weather descends! It sounds ridiculous, but we have a lot of territory to cover in these northern parts by mid-September.

 

Our first stop in Canada was the town of Ganonoque. My impression from the cruising guide was that it is charming, and we were not disappointed! Again, the marina was much more lackadaisical that we are accustomed to, but they did at least answer the radio, and sent someone to assist with our lines when I requested it! It also helps to find our slip if there’s a friendly dockhand waving at us!

 

We took our bikes into town, which entailed some major hill negotiating, a couple of detours, and fancy street-crossing, and stopped at the tourist information center. Such wonderfully helpful people! Roy got his Canadian fishing license, I got hooked up with a computer store where they’d let me bring the computer and plug in to their DSL connection so that I could post to the website, and just had a lovely time chatting with the ladies running the place.

 

We locked our bikes and walked further into town, and found a thriving little town with tons of shops (including a Tilley shop!) and bustling people. I found a hair salon where I was able to make an appointment for the next day, and we identified a Chinese restaurant to return to for dinner. We were both having a Chinese food craving.

 

One of the things I noticed throughout town was the number of plaques and monuments commemorating the war of 1812 and fallen soldiers of same. It felt a little funny to be there reading those, knowing that WE (USA) had been the ENEMY at that time. Actually it was pretty hard to fathom! I’m glad we all finally got it sorted!

 

We were sorely disappointed in the Chinese restaurant, but I was thrilled with my haircut the next day (I’ve never had it cut almost exclusively with a straight razor!), and the guys at the computer store wouldn’t even let me give them any money for the use of their internet connection. Two for three – not bad!

 

We left early the next morning for Brockville. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet the spectacular scenery we enjoyed in the Thousand Islands area. In spite of the threatening weather, which persisted throughout that portion of our trip, it mostly didn’t rain, just threatened, and the beauty of our surroundings in no way suffered. Charming little islands, rock cliffs, quaint little cottages, spectacular mansions, and, yes, even castles! Everything is made of stone and wood, and the evergreens provide a wonderful contrast. The water is clear and blue. It is truly beautiful! The photos do not do it justice.

 

We had our pick of spots to dock in Brockville, and really enjoyed strolling around the town. It is clean (like most of the towns we’ve been in) and friendly and has little pastry shops and cafes and even a Farmers’ market on Thursday mornings, which was the next day! No way I was going to miss that!! Although it was reputedly not as big as the Sunday market, I found fresh strawberries (we’ve been following strawberry season north, it seems!), snow peas, snap peas, and asparagus! YUM! Well worth staying a few extra hours for!

 

We headed from there to Morrisburg, where we were staying in a marina called Crysler Park Marina. This was another of the lackadaisical marinas – they told us to take any slip in the first two docks that didn’t have a “reserved” sign. Sounds great, but that meant some cruising around in tight spaces to look around. We thought we’d found one, but then determined that it was really too small, so found another, and a couple of guys nearby grabbed our lines for us, and helped us maneuver in. Geeze, where would we be without our fellow boaters?

 

After we got settled I took my bike to the “Upper Canada Village” which I’d read about, but wasn’t really clear about what it was. Turns out to be a Williamsburg-like recreation of an early 19 th century Upper Canada village. It was absolutely fascinating! I was sorry I only had a little more than an hour there before they closed, but it was an hour well-spent. I asked one of the guides how it had come to be, and she told me that when they were planning the St. Lawrence Seaway, and planning the building of locks and dams and diverting the river, they decided to move the period houses to this location rather than flood them, and they put it all together into this little village. It is really well done and very interesting!

 

I had quite a bike ride back to the boat – it was very windy, and now I was riding against the wind. I was also trying to beat the rain, which was definitely imminent, and so was trying to make some time. It was a good workout!

 

This was the Thursday before a holiday weekend (Saturday would be Canada Day), and people obviously planned to spend it on their boats. All evening people poured onto the docks and their boats, lugging all sorts of food, etc., complete with children in tow. There was definitely a festive atmosphere on the docks, which we experienced well into the night. No rowdy behavior, just festivities. The rain and hail (!) were blessedly brief, and didn’t seem to dampen anyone’s spirits!

 

Our first St. Lawrence Seaway locks were the next day. These were the locks in the US part of the Seaway: Eisenhower and Snell locks. These are the biggest locks we’ve encountered so far in our travels, as they must be able to accommodate the huge commercial freighters and barges that traverse the Seaway. They are also geared primarily for those commercial vessels, and pleasure boats are very much “second class citizens.”

 

The way these and the other Seawa locks work is as follows: you may not call them on the VHF radio, as that is reserved for commercial use. Instead, you must motor up to the lock, find the “Pleasure Boat Dock” (usually tucked around a corner somewhere, but certainly poorly marked), tie up there (yes, we want to be sure to have as many docking opportunities as possible, especially when there are inferior or insufficient cleats!), get off the boat and walk up to the special phone which you use to tell the lock “guys” that you are there and would like to lock through, listen while he tells you that he will inform the controller that you are there, wait an hour or more (we actually waited for four hours at one lock!) until they make an unintelligible announcement in French (could actually be any language, it’s just garbled and impossible to understand!) over the loudspeaker at the dock, which almost certainly means that it’s time to cast off and enter the lock, pull into the lock, which is HUGE, and try to figure out where the lock guys want you to stop so they can throw you the lines, get the lines secured, scurry around to put out extra fenders on the other side of the boat because, in this HUGE lock, big enough for the largest freighter, they’ve decided to raft the other boats to you, rather than giving each his own place along the wall! After everyone is tucked in they close the lock doors and in comes the water (if you’re going up) – and it does rush in! Then you finally get to the top, and they now want money (we spent a total of $180 in the locks on the Seaway!) before they’ll let you out! Sure, I can see why they’d charge for such great and friendly service and such a great experience, too! But, as one boater said to me, which realigned my perspective, “At least you’re not in an office!” I thanked him for bringing me back to earth!

 

We made our way to our marina after getting through the locks, and got ourselves secured in a slip. Shortly thereafter, the boats started arriving in droves! We were very happy that we’d gotten there early, so as not to have to maneuver among the other boats to get into our slip! We were definitely surrounded!

 

AND we were surrounded by French! Since arriving in Morrisburg the day before, we were in Quebec, and, make no mistake about it, French is the first language! It was like suddenly being in a foreign country to be surrounded by a foreign language. (OK, so we were in Canada, but that doesn’t usually feel truly FOREIGN) I loved it!

 

The marina was in a valley, and we were surrounded on all sides by a large park up on a hill, and from there you could walk to the shopping area of the town. There was a big grocery store as an anchor for a mall (!), and we did a goodly grocery shopping there. The weather was still iffy, with rain threatening on and off, so we headed back to the boat before the rain.

 

The next day, Canada Day, we were headed for an old abandoned canal wall where we could tie up. Before we left the marina, we visited with an experienced boater who was docked next to us. He came aboard Mer Sea and showed us on our charts some very rocky areas we’d have to go through when leaving Montreal for the Ottawa River. He was able to give us information about what to look out for, and which routes to take, and also possible marinas where we could stop. He was a great guy, and very helpful! We’d had no idea of the potential for trouble until he’d pointed it out to us. Another example of boaters helping boaters.

 

In Canada, we’ve found that the canals are often surrounded by parks that support RVs as well as boaters, and our next stop was no exception. It was extremely windy, and there were limited cleats to tie to on the canal wall, as well as limited space in which to tie. Fortunately, one of the guys in the RV parked in front of where we were docking leapt to our aid and took a line from me to help us get in. It was very rough and, did I mention, windy?! Thank goodness, once again, for the kindness of strangers!

 

We felt that we’d gotten into the dock just in time, as we watched the wind stir up the waves on the lake we’d just come off of. Even in the canal where we were the water was extremely rough, splashing over the stern of the boat in regular intervals. We actually probably should have been facing into the wind instead of having it behind us, but there was no way we were moving the boat at this point – we’d just have to suffer!

 

Actually it wasn’t that bad, and we had a nice walk in the village and found a great French bakery that was open (on Canada Day – like our fourth of July). Great pastries. The guy in the RV in front of us befriended us and offered to pick up anything we might need with his car. We didn’t need anything, but it was sure nice of him to offer.

 

The next day we were supposed to go to Montreal. It wasn’t raining, but the wind was still blowing hard, and we debated for a while whether or not to go. Because the majority of our trip would be in extremely protected waters, with just a short part in the beginning on the lake, we decided to go ahead and head out. Just about the time we made that decision the generator stopped. The flashing light code read “No raw water flow”. Roy had just checked the sea strainers the day before, so we knew it had to be the impeller. There was nothing to do but just head to the engine room and change it. All part of boating.

 

Roy headed to the engine room with the Onan manual in hand, and he clearly wanted to be left alone to commune with the genny (as I affectionately call her). I went about my business readying Mer Sea and myself to get underway.

 

Within a pretty short period of time, Roy reported that the impeller looked brand new – pristine. Okay, that wasn’t the problem, chalk it up to a little practice taking the genny apart to change the impeller, and look for another cause of the problem. The only other possible cause was the sea strainer, so Roy checked it (for the second day), and, lo and behold, it was packed with grass. Not only that, but the hose leading to it was completely clogged as well. We fashioned a long hook with some wire to fish the grass out of the hose, and when we thought it was clear, fired up the genny again. Success!! Another job well done by Captain Roy!

 

We finally got underway, and I called the marina in Montreal to make certain that they’d be there late (since we were getting a late start). No problem, they said, they’d be there until 9:00 because of the fireworks! Good for us on all accounts!

 

We made our way through four more Seaway locks getting to Montreal, and there was a little extra challenge because of the wind. All the extra docking and tying up in the wind is giving us lots of good experience, I guess…Anyway, we made it through irritated, but unscathed. We were so happy to see the marina in Montreal, I can’t tell you! And what a great and friendly staff! They were enormously helpful.

 

The marina where we were staying is brand new, actually still being built, and only had just gotten power to the docks two days before our arrival. They have no restrooms built yet, nor water to the docks yet, except for a LONG hose created by 5 hoses strung together that you can drag over to your boat and hook up to if you wish. We declined. But we were very happy with the staff and the location, and we had power, so we had no complaints. The price was right, too!

 

I’d told Roy to be prepared to eat out every night in Montreal, because there are so many great restaurants in town and we all know how I love food. We set out that first night to find our first victim, and I was enchanted by Montreal! We were in the heart of the Old City, and might as well have been in a French city. It is beautiful, old architecture, flowers and window boxes everywhere, cobblestones, outdoor cafés, and everyone speaking French! We found a fine restaurant and had an excellent dinner. I was in heaven.

 

We got back to the boat, and the wind had yet to let up. It was cold. There was supposed to be a fireworks display after dark (which comes quite late this far north at this time of year) and we were positioned perfectly for front row seats from Mer Sea’s upper deck. We bundled up in our warmest clothes and set up our chairs to enjoy the show. And what a show it turned out to be! Neither of us has ever seen such a display, and this one was even synchronized to music! It was worth braving the cold for!!

 

We spent the next few days wandering around Montreal, taking in the old section, the waterfront, Chinatown (where we had a great dinner!), the Jazz Festival, and generally speaking simply enjoying ourselves. I absolutely love the city! We were told on more than one occasion that we shouldn’t leave Quebec without seeing Quebec City, but that’s going to have to keep for the next trip – there’s just too much to see and do. But the word is that if Montreal is good, Quebec City is spectacular. I look forward to seeing that some day! For now, Montreal was quite enough, and we had a great time!

 

While we were in Montreal we took a look at our proposed float plan and realized that we’d set some pretty ambitious travel days for ourselves, so made some adjustments to the plan to make things a bit more manageable. The day we left we had two Seaway locks to get through, and then the treacherous, rocky route we’d been warned about to get to the Ottawa River. We’d decided that this would be quite enough for one day! It turned out to be a great decision. We left at 6:00 AM so as to hit the first lock at 6:30, before any other traffic would be there, so we wouldn’t have a long wait to lock through. HA! We waited for four hours! We turned on the generator and used the time to clean up the boat, vacuuming, etc. And to chat with other boaters. We met a particularly nice couple on one boat, and had a great time chatting with them. She, especially, was interested in Mer Sea, and got the nickel tour. She made all the right noises of appreciation – very satisfactory!

 

After getting through the locks, we picked our way through the rocks, (happily a well-marked route, but still hazardous and nerve-wracking) and landed at the canal wall of the St. Anne de Bellevue lock – our first Parks Canada lock. It was here that we purchased our Seasonal Mooring Pass and Seasonal Locking Pass that are enabling us to lock through and tie up to canal walls to our hearts’ content for the rest of our trip. Well worth it!

 

We loved this little town! It is a resort town, with tons of restaurants, and the tourists all stroll along the canal wall in the evening. We had many pleasant conversations with people strolling along, many of whom would see that we are from Punta Gorda and would strike up a conversation. The town is clean, neat, and friendly – and this has continued to be our experience of towns here in Canada.

 

The next day we were happy to be going to a full-service marina, where we could pump out, do laundry, fill our water tank, wash the boat, and get all those kinds of mundane but necessary things done. It was an expensive stop, but is on the grounds of the Chateau Montebello, a large log (yes, log) chateau. Amazing. The grounds are lovely, there are several restaurants on the premises (it’s a hotel), and it turned out to be a great stop. I’d love to go back sometime when most of our time wasn’t taken up doing “chores”. Another time.

 

We left early the next morning so as to get to Ottawa early enough to get a good spot on the canal wall downtown. It was a very pleasant ride on the Ottawa River, which is surprisingly rural, almost right up to the city. To get to the canal you have to go through a flight of eight locks which lift you a total of 79 feet from the Ottawa River up to the city level in the canal. It’s quite amazing! These are the first locks on the Rideau Canal, and almost all of them on the canal are still operated by hand cranking the gates. I’ll tell you, those lock keepers really earn their keep! Especially on the 8 step locks, where they are running up and down the steps to help boaters tie up and release their lines, as well as cranking the gates. Whew!

 

We had a “full house” when we traversed the locks, for which we had to wait for about 11/2 hours. No big deal, however, because the lock keepers were friendly and kept us informed, and we could walk up and watch the other boats in the locks and see what was in store for us. It was quite helpful, actually. When it was our turn, it took a couple of locks before we got into a sort of rhythm, but then we had it sorted, and the practice has served us well up to this point.

 

We were lucky to get a great spot on the wall in downtown Ottawa, the one right next to the one water faucet! We were within walking distance of every possible sight, and the big open air market, and couldn’t have been happier. We got Mer Sea secured and then spiffed her up for Mercer and Debbie, whom we’d meet the next day, and then relaxed!

 

We had fun being tourists the next day with Mercer and Debbie. We took a tour of Parliament, which was very informative. The library has just been redone, and is on the list of the top 10 sights to see in Canada. It is, indeed, spectacular! It’s round, all wood, several stories high, with ornate carving throughout…I could have spent quite a lot of time there. Our guide was very good, and was able to answer all our questions, and it was definitely time well spent!

 

We had lunch in a little Irish pub, outside of which a troupe of dancers were doing some not-so-typical Irish dances. It was fun! After lunch we scoped out the huge outdoor market, where you can buy any kind of fresh flowers, produce, cheese, meat, you name it, at either a stall or one of the stores lining the streets. It was bustling with activity, and very tempting! I’d decided not to buy anything until right before we left, since we’d be eating out for the next couple of days. But it was hard to resist!

 

We had dinner that night at a café right across the canal from Mer Sea. It came highly recommended, and with cause. It was delicious! We made plans to meet Mercer and Debbie at their hotel to watch the parade of the guard to Parliament for the changing of the guard the next morning.

 

The parade was fantastic! Bagpipes, tall bear-fur hats, brass band and drums, the whole nine yards, as they say. It was great!! From there, we went over to Mer Sea, and readied her for a short trip on the canal. We’d learned of a small lake about three miles away where we could tie up and go into town for lunch. Apparently it’s Little Italy for Ottawa, with many Italian restaurants from which to choose. It was a perfect day, beautiful sun and calm winds, and we had a lovely boat ride to the lake.

 

What we hadn’t counted on was the fact that the World Cup game between Germany and Italy was that very day. We realized it the minute we set foot in the town – the lines to get in to places were VERY long, and there was lots of excitement on the streets. We finally found somewhere that didn’t have a bar and TV, and so wasn’t so crowded, and got a great spot on the outside terrace. The food was excellent, the service was fine, and from there we had a wonderful view of the people and cars bedecked in Italian flags going by. It was really fun!

 

We had dinner that night at a place specializing in Prime Rib, which has sort of become the Holy Grail for Roy. He’s been disappointed the last couple of times he’s ordered it, so we thought we’d try this place and see if we could break the streak. It turned out to be a good choice. We all had excellent meals, although too much food, and then took a long walk after dinner. It had been so much fun to meet up with Merc and Debbie, and we hated to say goodbye. However, we finally managed it, and repaired to our separate lodgings.

 

On Monday, Roy and I went up to the Parliament to see the Changing of the Guard from another perspective. I wanted to know just what they did after they marched up there. Well, what a show! It took about a half hour, and there was lots of music, marching, inspecting, and then the keys were passed to the new guards and the changing was effected. The old guard marched off and the new guard began guarding.

 

After lunch we went to the big market, where we bought all kinds of fresh produce and delicious cheeses and deli meats. What fun that was! Blueberries, raspberries, lettuces, beans, asparagus, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, you name it! When I finished storing all that bounty, the cupboard was FULL!! We were ready to set off on the Rideau Canal.