We're in Port Orillia, ON at the end of Lake Simcoe, close to the end of the Trent Severn Waterway. We stayed on a lock wall at lock #39 last night after going through 8 more locks and about 30 miles of canal. Staying on lock walls is pleasant and usually rural, away from any traffic and tied up with 2 or 3 other boats. There's usually a little park with picnic tables, grass and trees. I fished the narrow canal channel and caught and released a small (14 inch) Northern Pike.

Most of the locks are hand operated by antique machinery, although in very good repair. This is one of the lock attendants opening a 25 ft. tall the lock door to let us out after the water had risen to the new level. After this lock, we reached the highest point on the Trent Severn Waterway and all the locks after this took us down instead of up.

The waterway goes through about 5 miles of channel that was dug through the forest floor, which is baserock, connecting the lakes and rivers to make a waterway. It's extremely narrow, almost too narrow to pass other large boats safely. You just have to go really slow and be really careful. There were stretches here where tree branches would brush the starboard side of the boat while we couldn't go any farther to port because of the narrow channel.

When you look down at the side of "The Narrows" channel, you see the rocks where they have dug a 6 ft. deep channel. It looks just like this for miles. In the places where the water gets wider, the channel doesn't so you have to keep in the channel carefully, even though the water surface looks wider. At one of these spots, we saw a boat hit the rocks by straying too far out of the channel when passing us. In addition, weeds covering the real bottom make depthfinders useless because they frequently show the water is 2 ft. deep. This is some scary stuff!

We went through the Kirkfield Liftlock, which is just like the Peterborough Liftlock, except at 50 ft., it's a little lower vertical height, and we were locking down instead of up this time. When you enter the lock, you just float right into the "pan" of water, so the view from the aft deck looks like this.

However, inside the lock, the view from the foredeck shows that you're hanging out over 5 stories in the air in a huge pan of water. Then they add more water to this pan and it weighs more than identical pan at the bottom and it drops slowly down as the lower pan rises on the other side of the tower. It's no place for anybody with acrophobia, but it is exciting.

Port Orillia is a large, typical tourist town with lots of ice cream stores, great baked goods, restaurants, shopping, and this prior city hall, now converted into a summer theater for plays. Everything is within easy walking distance from the marina, and the marina has free wireless internet. We're staying here 2 days to enjoy the town before we finish the Trent Severn and make it to Lake Huron.