July 3-4, 2019 – We pulled into Peterborough Municipal Marina, and were met very efficiently by Ben (!) and a crew of dockhands to get us situated and welcomed to the area. Ben and his wife, in addition to working at the Marina, are the AGLCA Harbor Hosts for the area, and had a nice welcome packet made up with information about the area, and a few goodies.
As an extra bonus, he even gave me a ride to the Canadian Tire store (sort of a cross between a WalMart and Lowes) to get some oil so I would have it on hand when the engines came due . We have realized that going slow through the locks adds up a lot of engine hours, even though not a lot of miles, and that the engines will come due for an oil change before we get back to the US. They had a sale on 5-gallon buckets, so I got two – matching side tables for the salon chair!
There was a free concert in the large park immediately adjacent to the marina that night, but we walked up the main street to drop into a few pubs and restaurants first. As it turned out, the music was not so much to our liking, so we threaded our way back down our dock to the boat, through several groups of local boaters with their chairs out on the dock between their boats, just hanging out.
The next day, we took our bikes over to the lift lock to get a look at it first hand. Wow!
For some specs – (courtesy of Wikipedia): The lock has two identical bathtub-like ship caissons in which vessels ascend and descend. Both caissons are enclosed at each end by pivoting gates, and there are pivoting gates at the upper and lower reaches of the canal at the junctions with the caissons. The gates on the caissons fit into slots on the gates on the reaches, so that they open in unison. Each caisson sits on a 7.5 ft (2.3 m) diameter ram, the shafts for which are sunk into the ground, are filled with water, and are connected with a pipe that has a crossover control valve. The caissons are guided up and down on either side by rails affixed to concrete towers. The caissons are 140 ft long, 33 ft wide, and 7 ft deep and when filled with 228,093 imperial gallons of water weigh 1,700 short tons.
No external power is needed: the lift lock functions by gravity alone using the counterweight principle. One caisson always ascends and the other always descends during each locking cycle. The upper one is always heavier, by filling with 1 foot more water than the lower side.
We went through a visitor center, and then walked out to see the beast, from below, before walking up stairs alongside one of the support towers. Rob, the operator told us that since they weren’t too busy, we could walk over the catwalk to the center pylon.
Right next to our dock in the marina was a tourboat operation that took people up, and then back down, the lift lock, we got a chance to see them come through, along with a much 45-passenger riverboat cruise ship that takes people on a 5-day cruise between The Big Chute and Peterborough. That boat took nearly the entire pan of the lock.
Rob was incredibly helpful, in showing us and explaining the operation of the lock, and we got a great closeup view of the operation from the operating tower.
Having gotten a pretty good idea of what to expect when we came through the lock the next day, we hopped back on the bikes and rode back down the hill to our marina.
Our friends on Justified had arrived, and anchored out in the small lake adjacent to the marina. They invited us out to their boat for a swim and a 4th of July picnic, so we dropped the dinghy and motored on out. We all hopped in the water, and floated around behind their boat for over an hour, before starting the grill. Great meal and chance to catch up with friends. They planned to go over to tour the lock themselves in the morning, so it looked like we might have a photo crew on hand for when we went up.
As we left, we zipped the dinghy through the mist falling from a giant fountain in the middle of the lake. Well, I aimed for what I thought would be just mist, but it wound up being a little heavier than that – whoops! At night, the fountain is lit with color-changing lights – here’s a view of it from the city’s website. Our marina is in the lower part of the photo.
