We began the Rideau Canal today. I’ve posted a few photos of its history in the photos.

The canal is supposed to be one of the highlights of our trip, with lots of beauty and quaint towns. It is 125 miles and has 46 locks. Many of the locks are step locks, where you go from one chamber immediately to another. Our first locks were a flight of 4 and it took about an hour to get through them + an hour of waiting to get in them. Total travel time today was 7+ hours and we only went 16 miles. It looks like it will take us 6-7 days to travel this canal. This canal is also very narrow and shallow in parts. At one point, we kicked up some mud when the water level go to 5.6 feet and we hit a few dead heads.

When we tied up to our final lock for the day and tried to access power (hydro it’s called here), we couldn’t get any power. We tried a variety of fixes with the dock personnel and then they called in the maintenance department . When they arrived, we had 7 men conferring (one on the phone) on how to solve the problem. It was quite fun to listen to the problem solving, all done in a methodical and collaborative way. They were all very pleased with themselves as they figured it out and felt they had learned something. It all had to do with a electrical splitter that we had. Once they figured out we couldn’t use just one leg of the splitter to access 30 amps of power but use both legs, we were told to plug both ends into one power pedestal. They hadn’t done this before but the electrician they had on the phone assured them it was safe. They told Kevin to hook things up and as he did they all turned their backs to us so they could say they didn’t see anything if something went wrong:) This took about 2 hours total to figure out.