Merrickville (2014-05-18)

N44° 54.992'm W75° 50.283'

Tonight finds us tied up at the blue line above the Merrickville locks, enjoying our last night on the boat before we get home.



It was pretty cold last night, but as we were at a lock with power we were able to run our electric heater all night, so it was toasty warm in the boat.

This morning dawned clear and cold, and by 0900 we were on our way once more.  Today we passed through what is probably the most scenic part of the Rideau Canal system, that being the Rideau Lakes.  Once again we found ourselves travelling through this area without being able to stop, bypassing many great anchorages and towns.  Hopefully we'll be able to revisit the lakes later this summer and spend more time getting to know them.

There wasn't supposed to be any rain today, but by midday we were working our way through Smiths Falls and we noticed the clouds were getting thicker and thicker.  We had some off and on scattered showers for about an hour, but nothing too heavy.

Dark clouds catching up to us in Smiths Falls

We did have a little mechanical issue today that proved to be a bit of a challenge to my boat handling abilities.  As we were entering the Smiths Falls detached lock I found that I didn't have any power to our bow thruster.  We had had some issues with weeds building up on it over the last couple days, so we thought that might be the problem.  We cleared the weeds and checked it again but still no joy.  I was forced to do without it for the rest of the day, and while the next couple approaches were a little shaky I did manage to get it all sorted.  By the end of the day I was having no problems with manoeuvring in the locks without the bow thruster.  I did some troubleshooting on it this evening but wasn't able to get it running again.  We had struck a good sized branch on our way up the Hudson River, and while that had caused some minor structural damage to the bow thruster that I managed to jury rig repair, it was still functional.  It appears that the damage might have been worse than it had appeared at first.  At least it was still working for us all the way through the Erie Canal, and through most of the Rideau.  Another item added to my maintenance list to take care of during our downtime over the next couple weeks.

We arrived at Merrickville at 1600, one hour before the closing time of 1700.  We were able to stay at the blue line for the night because the cut off for locking through Merrickville is 1.5 hours before closing time.  You can stay on the blue line at locks on the Rideau after normal hours, but you do have to either move or lock through when the lock opens in the morning.  This isn't a problem for us as we'll be ready to continue on at the lock opening time of 0900.

Merrickville Locks blue line

When we arrived at Merrickville we noticed that there was a dock along the blue line.  This was something new, but when we checked with the lockmaster we found out that this is the dock that is normally over in the pond side, and that the barge staff didn't have a chance to get it installed before the long weekend.