Monday July 30th

Nous sommes arrivé à Montréal!  We had a pleasant trip through the canal de Rive Sud and had very few delays at the 2 bridges and last 2 locks before Montreal.  We noticed that some of our fellow boaters have much bigger boats that we do but we managed to share the waterways regardless.  When we reached Montreal, the canal dumped us out just below the Jaques Cartier bridge, 45° 32.08N 73° 31.92W, so we had a short upstream trip to Port 

d’Escale where we would be staying for the next few days.  Unfortunately there is a BIG current in this part of the river against us since we were now heading upstream.  The chart showed 4.5 knots and Ron was hoping that this part of the river would be tidal which would mean that, at times the current would be less.   No such luck – we now know that this current runs 24 hours a day.  So we bashed on at 5.5 knots making 1 knot over the ground, and when the current got to 5.5 knots we increased our boat speed to 6.5 knots (close to our max speed).  After a grueling hour and a half we made it past the current into Port d’Escale, 45° 30.37N 73° 33.04W, which is located right in the heart of the old city – perfect.  We checked in, cleaned the boat up, provisioned and went out to dinner in the old city.

Ship’s log: 2006.0 Today's log: 19.8nm, Season total: 370.5 nm