Orillia to Kirkfield

Sunday, July 5

After a nice day in Orillia yesterday it was time to continue our journey. The morning dawned bright, clear and winds much lighter than the last two days. The first photo is as we are leaving the marina. From there it was about two miles across Lake Couchiching through the narrows into Lake Simcoe. The narrows being between the two lakes is a hub of local boating activity, there are five marinas there, catering mostly to the locals though some will accommodate transients.

The mural on the end of this row of slips is of a small outboard capsized, with a man with a bottle lying on his back. The dog in the bow is howling, a gull is on his chest with a fork and napkin around its neck, while a turtle uses his life jacket as a raft and sets a sail on it. The caption reads “This man is sinking, because he has been drinking”. I have noticed a big effort here in Canada to combat drinking and boating, I don’t know if this is a strong proactive campaign or a reactive one to a major problem. There laws on drinking while boating are stricter than those in the U.S.

We then headed for the fifteen miles of open water across Lake Simcoe to the Talbot River section of the Trent. The 10 to 12 mph wind was on our beam and we rolled a little for the two hour crossing, but soon we were headed in behind the break water. The Talbot River follows a rather winding route and when the canal was layout this section was done with a man made stretch of channel that is mostly straight and crosses the river several times.

In this stretch there are five locks in a stretch of about four miles. These are all old manual locks with the gates and valve hand cranked. The total vertical lift of the five locks is 73 feet. We approached the first one and tied to the blue line. The lock attendant came down and said they were waiting for boats coming the other way and it would be about 15 minutes.

Soon we were into the lock with two other boats and they closed the gates, and opened the valves in the upper gate to let the water in. From here on the next four locks had their gates open waiting for us. When they had just locked a group of boats through the other direction traffic got a little tight.

At one lock Diana got a picture of the attendant walking around the capstan to open the gate. If you note in the pictures there are heavy rubber coated cables running vertically on the lock walls. You slide your rope behind this cable and then it just slides up (or down) on the cable.

Some of these locks are on the canal and there is no dam others are in conjunction with the river and there is a dam and above it a small lake. It had been a long morning but I didn’t want to stop for fear of getting out of sequence with the lock cycle and then find the next cycle to have a full load of boats, so we pushed through all five locks and decided to tie to the lock wall above the last. When we got there it was very busy with several boats tied to the wall and five waiting to lock the other way.

We pushed on through a swing bridge that opened to let the boats we locked with through, then circled back into the wind and dropped the anchor. We relaxed at anchor and had some lunch then upped the anchor and continued on thru a couple of small manmade lakes. Soon it was through another narrow canal section and we were at the Kirkfield lift lock.