Wednesday, July 24, 2019
It would have been easy to hang around Fenelon Falls for a couple days. The lock area was nice, we had a view of the falls from our sundeck, Bo had nice green grass just outside our salon door, and the little town was great. However, we needed to keep moving along.
Our trip from Fenelon Falls to Portage - Lock 39 covered 26 miles and 5 locks. We motored over to the blue line at Fenelon Falls at 9:20am to begin our journey. Fenelon Lock 34 took us up 24 feet to Lake Cameron. Less than four miles later we went through Rosedale Lock 35 which took us up an additional 4 feet to Balsam Lake, the highest elevation on the TSW! It was all downhill from there.
We finally we came to our second lift lock, Kirkfield Lift lock 36, which is also the second highest lift lock in the world, after Peterborough. Kirkfield Lift Lock used the same basic concept as Peterborough’s, only it was smaller and made mostly of steel instead of unreinforced concrete. While the Peterborough Lift Lock is bigger (65 feet instead of 49 feet here), it was still very interesting to ride in a water filled chamber suspended 49 feet in the air watching another chamber go up as we went down. We also had a chance to meet a few people in smaller boats passing through the lock with us. They had some interesting boat names (see photos).
Upon exiting Kirkfield Lock, we entered Canal Lake which is very shallow, so it was important to stay in the channel. The red and green channel markers also switched sides here to make it even more interesting. Our trip covered a combination of small lakes and very narrow canals. The usual view of summer homes and cottages gave way to a rural countryside. Today’s ups (28 ft) and downs (85 ft) added up to a total of 57 feet down!
We had been warned that there was a lot of construction activity around Lock 39 in Portage, ON. However, we were also told by some of the earlier lock personal that the area was in good shape and an extremely quiet place to stay for the night. They were all correct! We tied to the upper side of the lock when we arrived, so we had a good view of the nearby farms, plus a nice breeze in the unusually warm weather. There were numerous construction vehicles moving about and a fair amount of dust and noise. We ran Bo around fetching a ball, and used the generator to cool down and warm up dinner. However, once the construction crews went home, it got really quiet. The birds and bugs even settled down after 9pm and it became amazingly quiet, so we called it a day and slept peacefully in the silence.