We're in Campbellford, Ontario on the Trent Severn Waterway, the "TSW". My Verizon Wireless card is still working.

Campbellford is right after lock 12. That's right, we went through 12 locks today, a personal record for us. They're easier locks than the USA rivers because there's no commercial traffic, meaning no huge barges that have to be cut in half to go through a lock while pleasurecraft wait 90 minutes. Here, the locks are usually open and waiting for you or open up in 5 minutes, and they run you up in 15 minutes. Very nice and efficient.

Some of the locks here are huge. There's a small orange spot on top of the blue doors here.... that a lock person with a life jacket on. This lock first has a lift of about 30 ft. and has the huge blue doors at the far end. The lock lifts you up just to the blue doors. You can see a grey waterline on the blue doors which is the high point water level. When you get that high, the big blue doors open and the exit doors for this lock then become the entrance doors for the next lock. They're connected together, so you go through, the blue doors close behind you and the lock lifts you another 30 ft. or so. Very impressive.

The TSW is a combination of dug canals, like the above picture, and open rivers with channel markers. Like the erie Canal, the dug channels are straight and boring and the rivers are really beautiful.

This picture has two points of interest: one is the cow.... must be a farm nearby and the cow's just down for a drink. We have seen cows standing waist deep in the water before. The second point is the WEEDS. Good Lord, they have humongus water weeds here. Any water that isn't more than 10 ft. deep has weeds growing up from the bottom loke a kelp forest and when they reach the top, they spread out like the picture above. The weeds here are out of the main channel, which is not this clogged, but this picture is probably mostly in 6 to 8 ft deep water. Weeds get caught on out running gear and stabilizers and slow us down a bunch. We tied up tonight on a channel wall at Campbellford with the stern to the river current and it cleared the weeds on our stabilizer fins. It's like the time we went with Jay and Kay to the Channeaux Islands north of Mackinac and picked up so many weeds I had to back up fast to clear them off.

We haven't decided if we'll stay here tomorrow or go on up the TSW, but I know we'll stay long enough to visit their much talked about bakery and get donuts for breakfast tomorrow and maybe a baguette for brie at "miller Time" when we tie up in the evenings.