Saturday, June 30 – Day 57: 
We dropped our lines from the Kingston Marina, and headed up the Rideau Canal towards Ottawa, 128 miles away.  The Rideau Canal was constructed in the 1820’s primarily as an alternate military route between Lake Ontario and Montreal just in case Canada’s enemy to the south ever captured the St. Lawrence River.  It consists of a system of beautiful rivers and lakes connected by 49 locks.   Today, the Rideau is used primarily by pleasure boaters, cottagers & tourists.  All of the locks on the canal are operated by hand via various systems of gears, pulleys and ropes, mostly by young teenage & college-age students supervised by an adult at each lock.   At many of the locks, local townspeople come down to the picnic tables at the sides of the lock chambers, with picnic baskets, and watch the show of the boaters trying to maneuver the boats of various sizes and lengths through the locks.    Some of the locks are multi-level, (called flights), to break up the  elevation difference among several chambers, so that when you leave one lock,  you immediately enter the next lock.    The 7 locks that we did today, even though charming and nostalgic, tested Belinda’s patience to the max because the lock chambers were extremely small with lots of turbulence and required quick securing of Rickshaw fore & aft else we might end up sideways in the lock.  As you know, Belinda is very petite and has (according to her) very short arms to enable her to quickly grab the cables hanging down the chamber walls while Jim attempts to keep Rickshaw close and parallel to the lock walls.    The rivers and lakes between the locks were very picturesque and, at times, appeared to be in the middle of a wilderness with only a few summer cottages peeking through the dense forest.  We decided to call it a day after only 25 miles at Morton Bay, which was a very protected & scenic anchorage surrounded by steep granite walls within just a short distance to our anchoring spot.   Since tomorrow is Canada’s independence day, Canada Day, there were several ski-boats, pontoon boats and wave runners in the bay, but by 5pm, all other boats except for one other cruiser had pulled up their day anchors and headed back to their summer cottages, leaving the bay almost completely deserted.  It was great after so many nights in marinas and town dock walls to finally be able to sleep under the stars with the windows open, feeling the cool lake breezes blowing through the aft cabin.

Friday, June 29 – Day 56: Today was an off day for the Rickshaw crew in order to absorb as much as possible about Kingston, Ontario.  As we soon discovered, Kingston is a very popular weekend getaway destination for both Canadians & Americans with a lot to see & do.   According to one of our tour guides, it is the largest fresh water diving location in the world due to the large number of British ships that were scuttled in the neighboring waters during the 1800’s.   It was the venue for the Montreal sailing events during the Olympics several years ago, because of the great sailing in the area.  Being at the intersection of the Rideau Canal, the St. Lawrence Seaway, and Lake Ontario, it has a long history as a strategic military location as evidenced by a large number of forts and other battlements in the area.    It  was also the original capital of Canada and so has a lot of history and very old buildings, dating back to the early 1800’s.  

Our day started with a bike trip to the local donut shop, Tim Horton’s, to get an internet connection fix via their free Wi-Fi to get updated on emails.   Following the email update, we took a tour via a local hop-on / hop-off trolley of the town, which took us around the town and the surrounding area.  One of the highlights of the tour was a visit to the fort that looks out over the harbor, and was built shortly
after the War of 1812 by the British to protect Kingston and the naval shipyard  from attack by the enemy, the United States.    Since this year is the bicentennial of the war, there were a lot of re-enactors throughout the fort, dressed in period uniforms and costumes, marching in rigid formation and even a cannon volley off of the fort wall overlooking Lake Ontario.  Following the trolley tour, we jumped on a free (yea!) ferry over to the largest of the 1000 islands (which is an archipelago in the St. Lawrence), which was “Wolfe Island”, named after the famous British general, “James Wolfe”, that won the battle of Quebec during the French & Indian war.   Please check out the poster shown below that we had seen at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News last year.       
 
We wrapped up the day by peddling over to the local hardware store & grocery store before returning to Rickshaw, where we met some great folks,  Eric, who is originally from Toronto and has a beautiful 1987 41 Defever, and a couple of  other loopers, Mike & Judy, from Virginia Beach, who were looping on their 50ft boat, One September.