Weather: Rain

Night Mooring: Driftwood Marina, Port Severn, Ontaria

Comments:

Good place to be for a rainy weekend.  Rick and Donna stayed on LF catching up on email and doing house keeping chores, awaiting the next crew’s arrival on Monday.

Crew: Pam and Tom Van Horn, and Donna

Weather: Mostly sunny

Canal and Lake: Mostly calm

Night Mooring: Driftwood Marina, Port Severn

Comments:

First off, those bathrooms rated 7-8 turned into 3’s once we took showers.  Teensy.  And the motion detector lights in the main bath?  5 minutes max.  Fixing one’s hair after a shampoo meant waving the arms every so often so see.  Nice marina though.  Lovely views.

This was our last day on the Trent-Severn, and we were just going with the flow.  We were glad for nice weather for the Big Chute, a rail passage that takes boats out of the water and carries them across land to the next body of water.  (See photos.) 

What an amazing experience.  Seems that the Big Chute was originally built because of insuffient labor needed to build the two locks needed for the area.  Long story short (tee hee), in the 1960’s when they finally went to build the locks, they realized that taking boats up over land by rail was preventing the spread of the sea lamprey eel up into the waterways from Severn to Lake Ontario.  Hence, a new chute was built, and it is amazing! 

Before they would let us on, however, the chute master called Loon Feather over to have a look-see.  A bit nervous about this old wood boat being able to support its own weight, he asked Captain Rick about the keel.  Over quite a few questions, Rick assured him that it would be fine - but of course we all held our breath!

The way it works is we drove into the carriage, whose bottom was submerged in many feet of water, so we were still afloat.  Then the master and the captain shifted LF so that the straps, there just to stabilize, not to hold, were centered appropriately on LF.   There was one other very small boat in the carriage with us, and that family was enjoying the show. 

Then, the carriage started to move on the rails - taking us up hill, out of the water, across a road and hundreds of feet of land, then strained mightally down a long pretty steep hill, and back into the water where Rick started up the engines and we drove away.  Cool, very very cool!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Chute_Marine_Railway

From there we had a quick journey to our final marina, Driftwood in Port Severn.  More like a dock-o-minium, the Driftwood is indeed lovely, with definitely high class baths.  Good thing, since Rick and Donna would be there for 4 days.

Dinner at the charming Inn at Christy’s Mill, cocktails by campfire, and a heron that allowed Donna to get within 10 feet to get his photo.  Seemed he was more interested in catching his own dinner from under the dock, than trying to catch a piece of Donna.

Next morning, Pam and Tom were off for New Hampshire in their car, which had been delivered to the Driftwood by the managers of the Trenton Marina way back at the beginning of our voyage.

Donna has posted a lot of pictures from this week.

6 ablums so make sure you clink on all of them