First, we went through the tallest lock in the TSW system. It drops 65 ft. from one section of rivers to the next. Kathy didn’t seem to get lockophobia in it though, probably because it was only 3 locks from the end.
Then, as we were motoring down a small lake, this float plane passed right by us 100 ft. up in the air, landed right in front of us, and then turned around and motored up past us.This afternoon, we went through the “Big Chute” rail lift. It’s like a lock, except it uses a huge rail carriage to portage boats over a 55 ft. drop of granite down to the next river section.
This is really an engineering marvel. They float boats into the carriage, support them with lifting straps, and the whole thing climbs up over a granite mountain on rails. We went down, but these are boats that came up, loaded on the carriage and approaching the water.
Then, it goes down into the water and the boats just float off and drive out.
Big boats, like Nonchalance and this one that went down before us, take up the center of the carriage with a couple of smaller boats in front. Note that they set the boat down on it’s keel on the cart floor with the props hanging out over the back end so they don’t get squashed against the floor by the weight of the boat. When we went through, they also had to miss the stabilizer fins with the lifting straps.
Here is what it looked like from Nonchalance when we were loaded on the cart, and traveled up over a small hill and looked down the 55 ft. drop to where we were going. The carriage is designed so that it doesn’t tip the boats much as it goes up or down. Very impressive and totally fun. John S. would have liked to inspect the mechanical workings of the lifting train and Hepburn cart, which were in class A condition and had full redundancy. Tomorrow, we’re going up to Parry Sound where we’ll anchor out in the wilds of Canada.
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