April/May 2012 and we arrive at The Landing to wake up the Chris Craft, say hi to our friends there who we haven’t seen all winter – most of them are from the Ottawa area or closer to Montreal than Toronto – and go boating again around the islands.
There’s lots of scrubbing and scouring, and refreshing some of the boat’s details with genuine Chris Craft parts…
For June we plan on our first “voyage”, although that is a somewhat grand word to describe a ten day trip up The Rideau Canal, but it was a grand adventure for us.
One of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century, the canal (or more accurately, the waterway) connects Ottawa and Kingston via the Rideau River (flowing north, down from Big Rideau lake on a central plateau to Ottawa), canals, locks, cuts, and lakes and the Cataraqui River (flowing south, down from that same lake) to Kingston. Total distance is 125 miles.
The canal was built with the intent of enabling military shipping of the time to avoid the St Lawrence from Montreal to Kingston, the latter being the main fortification on the river, in the event of another attempted invasion by those pesky Yankees, who had taken to the waters of the St Lawrence in 1812. Since there were no more wars between Canada and the USA after the canal was finished in 1831, the soldiers went home and the canal became a cargo route and then, once the railways became dominant, used for pleasure craft.
The Rideau Canal is Ontario’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site, carved out of the solid granite of The Canadian Shield in an amazingly short, five year period in the 1820s by a few Royal Engineers of the British Army led by Colonel By, a thousand craftsmen, and as many as four thousand Irish, French Canadian and other poor souls, using picks, axes, shovels, dynamite, horses and oxen. As many as 1,000 labourers and a number of soldiers died in the construction, mainly of malaria but also several accidents, especially due to the clumsy use of dynamite, and memorials and cemeteries are scattered along the path of the canal.
You can moor up to the 45 locks, run by Parks Canada, stop at marinas and towns such as Westport, Portland and Smiths Falls, or anchor out in one of the many beautiful lakes. In June we set off with our charts…
And a short video to wrap it up…
The Rideau became a favourite of ours, and after a great deal of island-hopping in July and August, we returned there in September for another ten day trip in the Chris Craft. That Rideau trip was our farewell cruise on SCOUSE for us since, although we loved the boat, we needed something a little bigger for our cabin accommodations.
In fact, we had found another boat by then and had it docked at The Landing next to SCOUSE before we sold the Chris Craft in October to our soon-to-be friends Bruce and Lori, Lori being the sister of my friend Daniel, one of the denizens of our local pub in Toronto, The Feathers. But that’s another story…
