July 4th - Locking through the St. Lawrence

We pulled the anchor early and left our santuary of an anchorage and headed back to the St. Lawrence river. We were preparing for the mighty locks that served commercial river traffic.  In the first pic below, I am discussing the strategy to negotiate the St. Lambert lock with Alan Lloyd, who has done the great loop three times.  The next pic show how we had to raft up with other boats while in the lock. The lock tenders would throw ropes down to us (around 50 or more feet).  The third pic shows Greg and Lou at the helm.  Greg would take alot of the running time on the river, while I saved my energy and concentration for docking.  But Lu also kicked in to captain the boat.  The fourth pic shows Lu passing a commerical container barge in the narrow canal around the Montreal rapids and the final pic shows the ship.  We arrived at St. Anne de Bellvue, a romantic small town where we moored on the lock wall along the promenade, had a good meal, and --for the first time - I celebrated my birthday outside the US.

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