After boarding the Viking Octantis ship in Toronto yesterday, we enjoyed the cruise briefing, exploring the ship, and dining at Manfredi’s restaurant. Settling into the cruising life!

Fall is a unique time of year requiring the ship to travel at night in “Bird Mode.” There are over 320 million birds migrating this time of year through the eastern part of North America. Every night around 9 PM, the ship will go into dark mode. Shades drawn down on all the windows, no lights on the outside decks, and the crew will do bird walks at night looking for any birds who have hit the ship and may be injured. Sometimes there are dead ones. One time, we are told, there were around 100 birds found dead on the open decks.

Today, our voyage begins by cruising on the St. Lawrence Seaway, “a system of rivers, locks, canals and channels in Eastern Canada and the Northern United States that permits oceangoingvessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes of North America.”

Rather than cover everything about the St. Lawrence Seaway, checkout the Wikipedia write up. An extremely important waterway to commerce for both Canada and the USA. The main cargo being transported through is copper and wheat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lawrence_Seaway?wprov=sfti1

A few brief facts for this cruising day: 7 locks, 5 owned/controlled by Canada, 2 owned/controlled by USA. Like any other seaway with locks, the ‘officials’ control when you will go through each lock based on traffic. Our schedule is outlined in our daily itinerary as follows:

Based on this schedule, probably I’ll only see the first few!

Quite a few people are up early this morning and waiting for the breakfast service to open at 7 AM, including me. The sun rises and shows the beautiful scenery along the shore of the St. Lawrence river – homes, industrial buildings, and forests, under a beautiful blue sky. Tinges of color can be seen on a few trees on either side. Large ships are heading the opposite direction, passing us as they head start to the Great Lakes. As we approach the first lock, people are waving to us on the Canadian side.

The first lock is actually the equalizer we are told. It controls the flow of the water between Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River as they join together. As we pull into the lock, you can see the gates are not completely closed. This is so interesting as I do not remember learning this while coming through the Welland Canal? Seagulls are lining the edge of the lock walls. Across the way, on the USA Side, there is a large wall. We are told these gates are lowered when the lake rises too much and the lock needs protection from damage. On each side of a lock reservoirs are built to control flooding as well. (I may not be explaining this exactly correct.) In the case of this lock, there is also a blue crane which will lift walls into place because of ice and to control the water when the lock needs repair during the winter. Traffic only runs through the St. Lawrence Seaway from mid March until early December.

Our second lock is the Eisenhower and is located and controlled by the USA. This lock will lower the ship 46 feet. Always fascinating and fun to watch. I promise no more pictures of the locks in this blog post!

A note about our ship – it meets the specs on maximum length for the locks . The ship is close on the width restrictions—usually about 2 inches to spare as well as when sailing under the bridges; the ship makes it with 2 inches to spare. You definitely want to have the technology onboard to be able to control your navigation precisely. Our wonderful Viking Norwegian Captain with years of experience helps!

A lecture by the onboard scientist in charge of on-ship research is humorous and well done. She is excellent at explaining all the science jargon to enable us novices to understand what actually is being done and why.

The last time I was on this ship there was a weather balloon launch. We are told at this lecture that there will probably be able to see one sometime on this cruise too.

The day is leisurely and easy to find a few places to sit and read a book until dinner. This piece of art is quite interesting as is all the art on this ship.

Having a day just sailing along for a first cruise day is wonderful! Tomorrow – two excursions in Trois-Rivière, Quebec which is the second city established in 1634 after Quebec City in 1608.