Heading Down River to the Locks

Tues Aug 23rd

I have jut got off watch at noon and am typing this up before it gets hot in the Salon.
It is a beautiful breezy day so that might not happen. It's too bad we can't sail cause it would be a fantastic day for sailing.

I had the last dock watch lat night between 10:00 and 11:00 pm. The last thing I had to do was go around and wake everybody up so we could get underway and we were off the dock and motoring down the river by 12:15. A bunch of locals that had been by to see us earlier in the afternoon came down from the bar and cheered us on :-)

The off watches were stood down until 5:00am when we all went on deck to standby as we went through the first lock. This one is a "control lock" that is really only used to control the water level at certain times of the year, it wasn't needed so we just motored through.  Three hours later, just after my watch took the deck we went through two locks in quick succession. Tricky steaming into them and then tying up such that the ship doesn't swing around as the water in the lock goes down. It is amazing how fast the water drops.

I'm glad I don't have to be steering, the pilot gives very rapid fire helm orders and expects them to be obeyed instantly. Nothing wrong with that of course, but our helm takes 14 turns from hard right to hard left which takes time.  Plus there is no indicator to tell how far over the rudder is so the helmman has to count the number of turns and partial turns to keep track of how many to take off to get back to midships.

Interesting to watch the process.

My station is with most of the 8-12 watch at the stern. Erin the Third Mate is our watch officer and she is in charge of the stern line. Lots of pulling and easing. She does most of it of course but we try to keep the line clear to run.

We have a four more locks to go through this afternoon.

Erin says we should be dropping anchor at Montreal around dinner time.

Then we will spend tomorrow undoing everything we did to the ship to make her fit the locks.

Then it is back to sailing I hope and we will be off to Lunenberg!
Woot!

More later

It is now 5:40 and we just went through two locks in quick succession. There are two more a few hour away and then we can anchor at Montreal. We got stuck behind a big freighter. The pilots actully called it up and complained that she was steaming ike an old grandmother. It took her nearly an hour to get through each lock, so we lost some time we should be in montreal around 10:00 tonight just in the middle of our watch.

Not sure what will be happening when we get there,  finish our watch and sleep for sure :-)

Blah, one of the messes on my right hand that I thought was a blister turned out to be an infection, hurt like a SOB when it broke. Maybe now it will heal up.

Otherwise I seem to be doing OK, no sea sickness (yet).

Thanks for reading.
KJ