Day 29: Soo Locks

 

The Soo Locks are what brought us to Sault Ste. Marie, and we spent most of today learning about the locks at the Visitors Center, watching boats go through the locks, and taking a locks boat tour.  We bicycled to the Visitors Center to see the exhibits and videos and to learn when freighters were scheduled to go through the locks.  The heavy fog that covered Sault Ste. Marie in the morning and the previous night worked to our advantage here:  4 freighters would be going up bound today as they all had been at anchor during the night just east of the locks due to fog.   

St. Mary's River in Sault St. Marie joins Lake Superior to Lake Huron.  The problem is that Lake Superior is 21 feet higher than Lake Huron, and also there are rapids in the river.  So a canal was dug to bypass the rapids, and the locks were built to raise or lower the boats (depending on which way they are going).  If going to Lake Superior, the boats are raised 21 feet, so they are said to be up bound; if going to Lake Huron, they are lowered 21 feet and are thus down bound. And you can really see the difference in the height of the boats in the canal with that 21 feet (see photos at the left).  We watched one of the Locks Tour Boats go thru the canal up bound and then  return, and then a series of freighters passed through the locks up bound.  One of these was the Edwin Gott, a little over 1000 feet long.  Two of the original locks still are in use,  with the Poe lock, the longest, used for the 1000 foot freighters.  The other two locks of the four are not deep enough for today’s freighters.

During all this “lock watching,” we ate lunch at a restaurant across the street from the Locks Visitors Center, and George felt our restaurant was “the real thing” when it came to fried whitefish.  He ordered the whitefish basket and really enjoyed it. 

We ended our Soo locks experience by taking the Locks Boat Tour which was quite interesting, and after watching so many boats pass through the locks, we went through ourselves on the tour.  The shorter of the two working locks was in use, so our tour boat went in the Poe Lock, the larger one, and a 600+ foot freighter came in behind us.  Each boat is tied along side the canal while the water level is being raised – a surprisingly quick process.  We saw many sights in both Soos –  Sault Ste. Marie, MI, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario – including the  Algoma steel mill in Canada, the International Bridge, and the longest freighter on the Great Lakes, the Paul R. Tregurtha (just beyond the bridge after leaving the lock in photo above).

It was a full and enjoyable day, and it ended with a nice view from our coach – the full  moon over St. Mary’s River.