Pictures from the Montreal to Lake Champlain run

I finally got around to downloading the camera and found a few fun photos from our Montreal and Richelieu run.

Down Time and the go fast boat

This first picture shows a boat that docked next to us in Montreal.  We figured the paint job alone probably costs tens of thousands of dollars.  And they probably spent more on the gas to get to Montreal than we will spend on fuel for the entire summer.

Ginny Belle in the Richelieu Canal

This a a picture of a boat we traveled with for a while.  Ginny Belle is a 27 foot boat that is probably 11 feet wide.  Down Time is 15 feet wide.  As you can see from Ginny Belle going through this open swing bridge, the Richelieu was very narrow in spots.  We also found that the lock tenders on the Richelieu were given to letting the water into the locks at quite a brisk rate.  Unfortunately, Down Time danced around quite a bit in the roiling water even with both of us holding on as tightly was we could.  The locks on the Richelieu are both short and narrow which means that when we locked through with other boats everyone was quite tense.  The Richelieu was not my favorite canal.

But we did see one interesting thing on the Richelieu we didn't see anywhere else, a fish ladder.  As you can see from the description below, a fish ladder is designed to let fish swim upstream past a dam.  There has been a canal in this area since the 1820s and the canal and dam design has always allowed for the spawning migration of the fish and eels that call this area home, until the current dam was built in the 1969.  This fish ladder was added to the side of the dam giving the fish a way to swim over the dam.  On one side of the ladder there are specially designed tubes to support migrating eels.

Fish ladder