Another beautiful morning as our ship starts to sail ahead into the Welland Canal towards Lake Ontario. We are following an Algoma Central Corporation ship. The schedule for our ship is set, an entire day!

Yesterday we saw the Vertical Bridge being raised to allow a ship through to Lock 8. This morning, we sail under the bridge at 6:30 am officially entering the canal.

On our way to Lock 7, we meet our sister ship, Polaris going the opposite way in the wider section of the canal.

If you want to hike or bike alongside the canal, there is a trail for that! https://ontariobiketrails.com/item/welland-canal-park-trail/

More factoids about the canal – it replaces the transporting by 950 trucks and 300 rail cars annually. The main channel is now 110 metres (350 ft) wide and 9.1 metres (30 ft) deep to permit two large ships to pass going in opposite directions. The current locks are 24 metres (80 ft) wide and 233 metres (766 ft) long. Below a picture of our ship approaching Lock 7 with another ship heading the other direction moving over to allow us to pass.

Entering Lock 7 is a tight squeeze!!

Pull up to within 1 yard of the gate, and start dropping down 30 feet., gates open and we are into the next section of the section of the canal with double locks.

A couple more vertical bridges, locks, and we are now at Lock 3 where I visited yesterday. Fun to see the viewing area and museum from the ship. Enjoying watching this lock release water for us. Our ship is running behind on the schedule due to the other traffic. We came through this lock at 3 PM

We meet up with the other ship coming the other way and both ships adjust their course to not collide.😁https://professionalmariner.com/bulkers-hit-nearly-head-on-in-welland-canal-accident-that-goes-viral/

Now at Lock 2, we are parked along the side for another ship to come through the lock. Again, slight delay. It’s a big one!

I’m blogging this as we go through the canal and am looking forward to showing a picture of Lake Ontario around cocktail time! Well, we have a special last night dinner tonight and I don’t think I’ll get that picture. So here’s to entering Lock 2 – cheers!

And quickly before dinner, I grabbed a picture of the ship entering Lock 1. We are holding up people from crossing the bridge! And if you look in teh distance, you can see Lake Ontario. We made it through the Welland Canal!