We waved goodbye to the land of croissants, fleur-de-lis and great tasting breads and buns at dinner.
We left Port de l'escale at 8:00am as we knew today is the day of locks. Being a please craft, it is known that you have a lot of time and take great pleasure watching commercial ships pass you by.
We turned to port (left) as we left the Port to enter a 5 knot downward current...we had approximately half a kilometer before we turned to starboard to start heading on the canal to take us to our first lock.
We travelled approximately 40 minutes to get to the first lock...."lock" must mean "to sit and watch" as we waited several hours until we were allow to enter the lock...and we didn't see any boats (ships) in or out of the lock, so not sure what we were waiting for.
We were the 4th boat in and were instructed to tie to the wall and we had 3 boats raft to our starboard side.
We met Maestro, Low Bidder, Kara Mia and another boat who had problems trying to get rafted up to any other boat.
In the lock, we were mostly Ontario & the country of Quebec as well as another boat that had crossed the Atlantic to make the same trip back as us....this large trawler ha a 14m mast and couldn't pass under the 12m bridge...he had to wait until they raised the bridge....the bridge guys and the lock guys believe that it is best to stop, slow or impede or else you may allow others to get to where they want to go...
We motored from Montreal to Valleyfield (thanks Kara Mia for getting us the spot) in just over 12.5 hours.
We got into Valleyfield at 8:30pm and decided to eat pizza at the second best pizza place in the world (Cornwall is number 1).
We had dinner with Mark and Kathleen on their 44' Meridian....great food, great boat and great people....a good way to end a very long day.
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