We travel along the big rivers of Quebec from Ottawa to Montreal and then turn south back toward the US via the smaller Richelieu River and Chambly Canal. Along the way we pass through a wide variety of locks, and enjoy both the big city of Montreal and stops in smaller towns.
Open in a separate window to click on the various icons and see pictures, route data, and/or find a link to the associated blog.
Once the final lock on the Rideau opened on the Ottawa River, we were in the Province of Quebec. There was a subtle cultural shift, but it was there. Most obvious was the official language being French. We’d heard more French than English ever since the Thousand Islands, but now it was rare to have any signage in both French and English and marina staff weren’t as fluent in English. But everyone’s English was way better than our non-existent French, and they were very gracious and patient with us, so we never felt uncomfortable or completely lost — just clueless. Secondly, the towns and Montreal felt decidedly more European influenced. The architecture, the types of shops and restaurants in downtown, and even history all felt just a little different.
We would be in Quebec until we crossed back to the US into Lake Champlain, and the route was all familiar to us. There really weren’t that many places to stop, which created a natural travel itinerary. On this leg we would transit through the biggest commercial locks on the St. Lawrence Seaway, the tiny and historic Chambly locks in which we barely fit, and a few others in between.
Ottawa to Montreal
Aug 10 – 13, 2024
Gatineau
Montebello
St. Anne de Bellevue
From Ottawa it was three straight travel days to Montreal. Our first stop was a marina just a few miles down the Ottawa River in Gatineau at Marina Kitchissipi to allow us to regroup and make the mental shift from the Rideau Canal to this leg of our trip. Our only foray off the boat was a walk through the neighborhoods around the marina to The Cheesecake Bar (located in a pizza restaurant). The ‘nice surprise’ along the way was a park and monument to something which we never figured out, as there was no placard or anything identifying it.
The trip to Montebello along the wide Ottawa River was quite the contrast to our cruising grounds of the narrow canal the previous week. We walked into the vintage town, with colorful storefronts, a big church, and historical placards that we couldn’t read. We picked up some cheese curds at the local Fromagerie that gave Wisconsin a run for its money– nice and squeaky – before hustling back to the boat just ahead of a thunderstorm.
From Montebello, the Ottawa River narrowed and the landscape became a mix of farmland and residential. The homes were noticeably larger and more contemporary sitting up high on the banks, with steep grassy slopes to the water. We were back in the land of tall silver church steeples and cable ferry crossings, and had two locks to do that day.
First up was the Carillon lock, a National Historic Site and thus managed by Parks Canada. It was originally built during the ‘I Know! Let’s Build A Canal’ Era in the early 1800s as a series of 11 locks and called the Carillon Canal. In the early 1960s, Hydro Quebec built a huge dam and hydroelectric plant, replacing those 11 locks with a single lock taking boats up/down 65’. Being Hydro Quebec and not Hydro Lock Quebec, they turned the lock part over to Parks Canada. In this lock you tie up to a 110’ long dock inside the lock, which in turn is attached to floating bollards and then the whole dock with boats attached floats up or down. It also has a giant metal guillotine-style gate that descends from high above on the lower end rather than doors that swing out.
As the only boat, we were dwarfed in this very big lock. A single Parks Canada worker helped us tie up to the dock, then climbed up a ladder and disappears with a casually tossed ‘there may or may not be someone to untie you’ as the doors closed and the cement block counterweight of the guillotine gate towered above in front of us. Being tied to a floating dock, there was nothing to do as we started going down, which at first felt strange. But soon we were both wandering around the boat, taking pictures or just marveling at how weird this was to be all alone. About halfway down, the Coefficient Of Creepy starts increasing as we’re being swallowed by the lock walls and there’s no human in sight. Then the Irrational Thinking Goblin gets in my head: what if one of the bollards jams??? Visions of the boat dangling from the dock that’s stuck along the wall flash before my eyes, or splashing sideways into the water by the time we cut both lines. It’s getting darker as the depth blocks out the sunlight, and I’m wondering if anyone would even know if we had any kind of problem. Finally we stop going down, the guillotine gate starts rising, and a crack of light eventually appears at the bottom of the gate. Dave starts the engines and I hop off the boat to untie us from the dock. I have a fleeting thought that this could actually be a time portal and we’re about to be thrust into a nautical Mad Max world as we depart this mass of metal and cement and invisible operators. But we emerged back into the glorious clear sunny day, with other boaters about and cottages lining the shore. And thus it occurred to me that after 20 minutes in the lock, I had the basics of a really bad dystopian sci-fi movie.
St. Anne’s lock later was like a cute kiddie version of the Carillon and totally non-intimidating. It was much more normal sized but like Carillon had an inside floating dock to which you tied up. This time, the Parks Canada staff took my lines and then stood on the dock chatting with me while we dropped a negligible two feet.
We stayed the night on the lock wall right after exiting the lock, walking the short distance across the lock to downtown St. Anne de Bellevue for dinner. Very little had changed since our previous visit. As we sat on the back patio of a pizza place looking at the boat tied nearby, I realized that out of at least 15 restaurants to choose from we had inadvertently picked the same one we had patronized two years ago! Not sure what that says about us, but it was really good pizza.
From St. Anne, we rejoined the St Lawrence Seaway and had two more locks to go through to get to Montreal. These are the giant commercial ones for the big boy freighters heading to and from the North Atlantic. They only do one timed lockage a day for pleasure craft and you have to sign up the day before. The first lock is at 4 pm and the second one before Montreal is at 6 pm. Those are really just ‘guidelines,’ because if a big freighter shows up they have priority. I suppose when you’re that big you can’t exactly just hang out in the narrow channel and do donuts.
We arrived at the first lock of St. Catherine’s over an hour before the 1600 scheduled lockage. They have a small docking area there for pleasure craft to tie up, but it can only accommodate a few boats and we ultimately had 11. We took the last little bit of dock space, and then had the added challenge of getting off it when the wind was pushing us on to it. This created a lot of. anticipatory angst on my part as we waited. I’m happy to report that in the end, with the help of a couple other boat crews there on the dock, Dave got the boat turned bow into the current and no boats, cleats, or swim platforms were damaged in the process. I, on the otherhand, went through a post-anxiety hangover.
The lock chamber is the size of 2 ½ football fields. The bigger boats go in first and staff drop lines down from the top of the lock wall for the bow and stern. Then the smaller boats raft off of these, two or three deep. Surprisingly, we were told to raft off another catamaran rather than being on the wall. Fine by me, because the lines they drop are those ¼” nylon ones that are really hard on the hands and slip on the cleats. As a raftee, we just stood there watching the crew of the Aquila to which we were tied work while locking down about 30’. Then all 11 of us made our way single file along the channel to the Lambert lock, where we got scooped by a freighter coming the other direction and had to wait about an hour. We repeated the same rafting procedure to go down another 30’. By the time we exited at 7:15 the sun was very low in the sky and everyone bolted to get to a marina before dark. We rounded the corner for the last mile up the St. Lawrence to Port d’Escale Marina in the old port of Montreal and Dave dodged tour boats and pleasure craft of all sizes while we fought the 3 knot current going upriver. We finally pulled into our marina just before dark, exhausted but looking forward to our time in Montreal.
Montreal
Aug 13 – 15
We spent two days re-exploring one of our favorite cities. We walked all through the Old Port and surrounding areas, had a picnic dinner in the nearby park watching all the pedestrians and bikes go by, smelled cannabis everywhere (that was a detractor), and watched as people zoomed by on ziplines high above the park. We ate crepes on Rue St Paul, donuts at a Chinese bakery in Chinatown, and a smoked beef sandwich from a food truck. Cirque du Soleil has a permanent present on the pier, and we took in their show Kurios. Bikes were everywhere – the pedal kind, hardly any e-bikes we noticed. Montreal is a vibrant, multi-cultural, ethnically diverse city with beautiful architecture and history and this visit reaffirmed how much we enjoy it.
Montreal to St. Ours
Aug 16
From Montreal we headed down the St. Lawrence Seaway, getting a nice push from the 2+ knot current. Very quickly the landscape moved from cityscape to the containers and loading docks of a large shipping port to industrial. As soon as we made the turn onto the much smaller Richelieu River, we were seeing residential communities and exchanging friendly waves with lots of smaller pleasure craft.
We locked through at St. Ours, a typical Parks Canada lock, to stay on the wall overnight. (We like to stay on the other side of locks when we can so we can depart earlier than their 9:00 am opening.) St. Ours had an adjacent park, campground, and nice facilities in the old lockhouse. It was the perfect place to relax in the shade of the trees after one of our longest travel days in quite some time. There was a small café right there, the only business for miles, that had ice cream and of course we couldn’t let that opportunity pass us by.
Chambly Canal
Aug 17- 19
Chambly
St. Jean sur Richelieu
Time for a return to old historic locks!
It was a short hop further down the Richelieu to get to the town of Chambly and the start of the canal. Along the way we saw a mix of farmland, suburban homes, and the occasional summer cottage. Weather-worn silos sat back beyond contemporary homes with colorfully landscaped gardens on the shoreline. Or a rusting tin roof of another silo stood in stark contrast near a shiny silver church spire. We gave cable ferries a wide berth and squeezed between the narrow pillars of the Boloeil Railroad Swing Bridge. Soon we were crossing the small lake and tied up on the blue line at the start of the Chambly Canal.
The Chambly Canal is another Canadian National Historic Site, built in the 1830s for commercial traffic but now for recreational use only. Like the Rideau, all nine lock are manually operated with hand-turned cranks. There are also bridges along the 12 mile canal, many of which are also manual swing bridges. These lock chambers are only 22’ wide at their doors – which means with our 18’ beam and 12” diameter fenders on each side, we only have about 1’ on either side as we pass through the gates. The lock staff hand you lines for bow and stern. When the gates open, you just toss the lines back to the wall and off you go.
The canal is bookended by Chambly on the north end, and St. Jean sur Richelieu south. At Chambly, we did the flight of three locks up the short distance from the basin to the Parks Canada dock right in town and spent two nights. This town has charm and history in abundance, with an old fort dating back to 1665 and actually occupied by the Americans in 1776. Now the historic downtown area caters to tourists with the canal and locks being a focal point – we had an audience all the way up. The main drag is dominated by restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, and ice cream stands all in easy walking distance – what’s not to like? We scootered around on the bike path into town and along the canal past several more locks. We met a couple other boats – one a fellow Gold Looper – and hung out with them one night at a quirky local brewery.
We stayed a second night because of high winds, and with the narrow canal and even narrower locks it would have been stressful for us even for the short distance. The following day was to be really rainy, but we decided it was worth moving on to meet our plan to getting back to New York on the 20th. As it turned out, that may have been one of our best decisions of the summer.
We had five locks in the first couple miles. With the locks so small, only two boats could lock through at a time and we were in the second group. Once you start the locks you must continue all the way to the end and maintain a speed of 6 mph so the lock and bridge staff can coordinate the traffic flow in both directions (i.e. there are only a few places where two boats can pass).
The rain held to a slight drizzle for the two hours it took to get through locks 4-8, then became steady and continued pretty much the whole rest of the way to St. Jean. In spite of the rain, the narrow canal was still very scenic, passing through farmland, scattered homes, and remnants of old locks and bridges that would have looked derelict in any other setting but here somehow looked rustic and charming. Bridges mysteriously swung open as we approached, the Parks staff communicating with each other and expecting us.
We had periods of downpours as we approached the final Lock 9 in St. Jean, passing what had been a beautiful multi-use park and plaza when we were here two years ago. It had been bulldozed (to be improved, we later learned, though we thought it was pretty nice already) and now was a muddy mess – a bit of a shock to see. I got totally soaked manning the bow line despite my rain gear as we locked through the final lock, then passed under the bridge we dubbed The Star Trek Bridge because of its space age appearance resembling the Star Fleet insignia – and our new friends who had been in the first lock group came out in the rain to help us get docked.
Fully expecting the cruisers Curse of Monday to be in effect and to find many restaurants and retail establishments closed in town, we had never seen a town so completely buttoned up in the middle of an afternoon. It was eerie, with the rain and bulldozed plaza nearby not helping the ambience. It was quite a contrast from the lively, colorful town we experienced two years ago. The only thing open was a hot dog place across the parking lot, which made Dave perfectly happy. It was a bit of a challenge to order even a hot dog with the language barrier, resulting in some condiment confusion, but all just part of the adventure.
Crossing Back Into the US
Aug 20
We left early the next morning, covering the 20 miles to the US border in about 3 hours. A single small buoy with a sign I could barely read statied it was the border. A very brief video call with Customs on the Roam app and we were officially back in the US and on Lake Champlain.
Au revoir, Quebec! Nous reviendrons!
Final Thoughts
Our Canada cruising encore did not disappoint, the excitement of the new mixed with the comfort of the familiar. It has been great weather and long days, natural beauty, friendly people, and clear water. We were reminded of the ease of freshwater cruising, made even easier by the Parks Canada staff and facilities. We learned some new history and refreshed what we knew from our earlier travels.
Life in Canada seems simpler to us somehow, and embraces the here and now more. We saw it in little things like people in professional attire eating lunch in a park rather than their desks, the abundance of bikes and walker and less traffic. Seeing things like a lone young woman in a bright yellow raincoat dancing along the canal in Ottawa in the pouring rain made me smile. Boats rafted together in an anchorage in the Thousand Islands on a glorious afternoon, sharing food and floaties and fun, were a simple way to just enjoy who you were worth and not overly complicated or costly. Art and artful displays were everywhere, streets were clean, and of course the flowers! Free concerts, farmers markets, weekend festivals all demonstrated how much the short season of summer is embraced.
We met new people – both Canadian and American – at almost every stop. But the one thing that was most noticeably different this time around was that we were traveling alone and missed the comradery of Loopers, especially those we buddy boated with or saw repeatedly at stops. Now that we have so few of these cruising friends that are still cruising, it further highlighted for us that we’ve had a great run with the cruising life but we’re ready to start thinking about our next adventure.
We departed St. Jean and a hint of fall in the air and the tips of a few trees. Our Canadian summer was indeed over — this Canadian summer. For we are already talking about the parts of Canada we have yet to explore – by car, train, RV, or maybe even bike. Returning has reinforced that the adventures we’ve had and places we’ve seen here on See Level are unique to boat travel and we feel incredibly fortunate to have had this opportunity and the many experiences. But it’s also opened our minds to the many other places to see and get to know a place and culture, and we leave knowing that we will return in the not too distant future.
There’s still some great cruising ahead of us on Lake Champlain before we begin our southern migration. September is some of the best cruising, with no crowds and milder temperatures. But first, we’re going to leave the boat in Plattsburgh and do a road trip!
Pops’ Stats Corner*
- No of Days: 10
- Travel Days: 8
- Miles Traveled: 237.2 (206.3 nm)
- Locks 14 (for a total of 232 locks we’ve done)
*Pops is the family’s affectionate name for Dave’s dad. He had a mind for sports statistics, earning him the nickname Numbers from the coaches of several Stillwater teams with whom he worked. This regular section of the blog is in his honor, because it’s the kind of thing he would love.
Fun! You traveled to a foreign country and heard a different language
Believe this is your beautiful mystery park:
Gatineau Cenotaph
https://www.veterans.gc.ca/en/remembrance/memorials/national-inventory-canadian-memorials/details/3945
See you guys next month!!!
That’s the Memorial! But where it is cement all around in the pics in your link, they’ve now expanded it into a nicely landscaped area with the giant metal poppies. We suspected it must be something around WWI given the red poppies, but surprised they had nothing we could find with even the name of the monument. It was also in a plaza right across from a big Methodist church, so maybe they had sometbhing to do with the artistic update.
This trip brought back so many good memories. I don’t remember which summer it was, but Bob and I were at a trial lawyers convention in Montreal and, at the suggestion of a past president lawyer friend, booked a stay at the British commanding officer’s home in Chambly on the banks of the Richelieu rapids. We waked through the town often and had at least one dinner in a small restaurant there, as well as nibbles. You were absolutely right about speaking French! Luckily, I had remembered something from two years of high school French and two semesters in college.
The officer’s quarters we stayed in had stone walls two feet deep and therefore didn’t need AC. It had been used as a movie set for one of Jackie Kennedy’s “homes” in some movie or TV show. The owners produced the most marvelous breakfasts for us, as well as greeting us on return from the day’s activities with drinks. Breakfasts included juices, homemade granola with yogurt or milk, a different egg dish with meats every day, plus pastries! On the day we left for Quebec City, they packed a great picnic lunch for us! (All 5 star rated by Linda!)