Shipping traffic was busy when we were down bound and we did have some 3 to 4 hour waits. For instance, at Beauharnois we had to bypass an upbound ship in the narrow canal between the upper and lower lock, not something I expected. Mind you we did have some interesting moments in the locks.

Traveling through the locks is not the most enjoyable part of any cruise, you get the feeling that pleasure boats are an inconvenience to lock operators. We departed SYC at 10:45 Monday June 30th, on what happened to be a rare sunny day. You can even find a brief discription of SYC on page 56, not bad for $7.95.

It’s a 139 page booklet listing ports of call from Crysler Park to the Magdalen Islands, the Outaouais, Rideau and Richelieu Canals, Lac Champlain and the Saguenay river. There are no comprehensive guides such as a Ports book, the most useful literature that we used was the Guide Nautique du Tourisme. Trying to find cruise information for this trip also proved to be difficult. This proved to be extremely useful, not only for navigation, but also for timing the tides and estimating our arrival times at our next destinations. One piece of equipment that was added to Boomerang for this trip was a Raymarine A60 chart plotter/ fishfinder. This was going to be a much different trip that would include more locks, larger waters, colder temperatures, fog, salt water and tidal currents.

Stormont to Montreal, up to Ottawa, the Rideau Canal to Kingston and back to Stormont through the 1000 Islands. Ray and I had not cruised eastward since 2001 and that was in Ad-Astra when we did the golden triangle.

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