Hygge Adventures: 079: Trent-Severn Waterway Part One

On July 17th we left Clayton first thing in the morning for a fifty n/m run to Picton, Ontario. It was overcast, so not conducive for great photography. That said, Nancy did get this shot of my favorite house. It is not a converted lighthouse, but rather a house made to look like a lighthouse. I’d love to sit up top on a sunny day and smoke a cigar with a little bourbon on the rocks:

Fifty n/m’s is a long run and we pulled into Picton rather late in the day. We stayed at a very disappointing marina: no power, cold showers and rickety docks, but there weren’t too many options. A nice Canadian couple came over having recognized Hygge from our Thousand Islands trip, and we wound up going out for pizza with them. Got a few shots of Picton, but our real priority was to go grocery shopping. Between our week off the boat, and prohibitions about bringing in meat, fruit and vegetables into Canada, we were low on perishables. It was a long walk back with groceries.

A few shots of Picton:

The next day we left early and headed out for the thirty-five n/m trip to Trenton, ON, gateway to the Trent-Severn Waterway (“TSW”) which connects Lake Ontario to Lake Huron. Two hundred and forty statute miles and forty-five locks! The AGLCA has “harbor hosts” (locals who volunteer to help Loopers) in most of the key ports, and the Trenton harbor host took a picture of us coming into the harbor. Our first stop was to top off the fuel tank to ensure we could make it to the end of the TSW and pump out the holding tank for basically the same reason.

Coming into Trenton:

The Trenton Municipal Marina is known for having the best bathroom/shower facilities on the Great Loop, and they did not disappoint, but I’ll spare you the pictures we took of them. Trenton has a decent “downtown” area very close to the marina, with the grocery store about 100 yards from the docks; made us regret the stocking up at Picton and making that one mile walk back to the boat, but you live and learn. We did have a nice meal at an Italian restaurant, which is notable because we’ve had so few memorable meals on this trip.

On the 19th of July we left Trenton to enter the TSW. We use the Navionics app on the iPad as our primary route planning tool, but sometimes I’ll route plan with Hygge’s Garmin chart plotter just so I can compare (Garmin calls it “auto guidance”) to Navionics. This picture shows why you should not use the Garmin’s autopilot feature with its auto guidance feature: for some strange reason, Garmin’s auto guidance feature wants to run your boat into bridge pilons. My first thought on the Baltimore bridge collapse was that the ship was using Garmin auto guidance (kidding). One Looper last year was seventeen miles from “crossing their wake,” got complacent and Garmin ran their boat into a bridge pilon caving in part of the bow.

Postings on FB boating groups confirm that this is not just us, and nobody has a good reason as to why:

We arrived at the first lock for the TSW with a few boats ahead of us, so we had to wait, no big deal. We didn’t really have a stopping point as there are a lot of locks and you just don’t know how fast you will go through them all. We thought maybe the town of Glen Ross which was only fourteen s/m’s away, but six locks. Well, long story short, the lockmasters perfectly synchronized the locks, so as we came to each one, the gates were open, and we just slid right in. We wound up going twenty-eight miles and twelve locks (a record for us) all the way to Campbellford, ON (which our guidebook basically said couldn’t be done).

Sign at Lock 1:

I think they want you to go slow:

Of note was the current as we approached the locks. Most of the locks are near dams (per usual) and the TSW area had lots of rain (remnants of Hurricane Beryl), so the current was running high. Some of the locks were close enough to the dams to make it a real challenge (see later video), and we had no problems (just need to angle into the current), but the guy behind us on the second lock wound up sideways for a few moments. (He figured it out eventually.)

Before reaching Campbellford we stopped briefly to walk across the Ranney Falls suspension bridge.

I was a bit leery remembering that second Indiana Jones movie, but I headed the advice on this sign and walked back and forth.

No need to tell me twice:

From the bridge, nice views:

The town dock-wall at Campbellford had a sign out for us:

We had a nice dinner at Dee’s Caribbean restaurant, which was a very nice change from pub food and Italian food. The next morning, we went to the farmer’s market, but our first stop was Canada’s number one rated bakery, Dooher’s Bakery. We got there ten minutes before it opened, and by the time it opened, the line was down the block.

Hygge from the farmers market across the river:

Monument to the artist who designed the "Toonie" which is the $2 Canadian coin:

Having run hard for three straight days, on the 20th of July, we only did six locks and seventeen miles, stopping at Hastings. The lock at Hastings was right next to the dam and around a sharp corner, so you had to be totally on your game. This video goes into a bit of the situation with the current flow due to the aforementioned rain.

At Hastings I made my second rescue of the trip. A small (16’) 1970’s era tri-hull runabout came out of the lock wall and right by where we were tied up and its engine died. I had one of the four adults on the boat throw me a line and they rafted up to Hygge while the guy tried to get the engine started. He only had to go across the river (upstream of the dam) to a boat ramp, so I offered to tow him with my dinghy. He got the engine started and took off diagonally (I would have gone up and over 90 degrees) while I put the dinghy in the water just in case. Sure enough, about halfway across, his engine died again, and they started drifting with the wind and current pushing them toward the dam. I fired up my little 2.5 h/p engine and zipped out to them. I rafted the dinghy off them and told the guy to raise his engine. It wasn’t a fast trip, but I did manage to tow them to their boat ramp. Nancy, who has taken thousands of pictures, for some reason didn’t get an action shot of the rescue, but she did get a shot of this Northern Pike statue.