Young's Point, Rosedale,and Orillia, Ontario

We had a long day Friday but didn't get very far. We left the Peterbourough Marina at 8:15 and arrived in Young's Point at 5:00. There were 8 locks with a lift of 148' but we only travelled 15.5 miles!

The second lock today was the Peterbourough lift lock. The lift is 65' and an ordinary lock wouldn't work here. It was built in 1904 and considered an engineering marvel. It has 2 pans of water that weigh 1300 tons each when filled. The boats drive into one pan and the other pan is either up in the air or below. They balance each other. It doesn't matter how many boats in a pan because a boat displaces it's own weight in water. When it's time to lower 1 pan and raise the other they add 1 extra foot of water(130 tons) in the upper pan. The upper pan is pushed down and raises the lower pan to the top. When we got to this today it happened to be not working. We had to wait for about 2 1/2 hours for it to be fixed.

There were people watching from the street through the hole in the wall of the lift.

John is checking out the situation!

Saturday was another long day from 8:00 to 6:00 because we stopped along the wall in a small town for lunch and to buy bread and sandwich meat-our lunch every other day!

We only had 6 locks with a lift of 69' but we did travel 53 miles.

Some areas of the canal are absolutely beautiful. You have to pay attention to where you are going. The canal isn't very deep and staying in the channel is a must. The sides under the water are granite. These were all cut by hand to finish the canal for shipping.

Just one of many bridges we went under.

We have now reached the highest point of the Trent-Severn Canal so now the locks will start taking us down. Sunday we went through 6 locks and were lowered 121' in 40.6 miles. Five of them were all within 3 miles. We had another lift lock but this time drove into the pan when it was in the air. This one is not enclosed so it makes you feel like you're hanging up in the air.

Orillia was our stop for the night. It was a very busy marina and part of the waterway. Our entertainment tonight was all the boats coming in off the lake after a weekend.