JULY 2…our 100^th anniversary (months, that is!)…Locks open at 9 (these are my kind of people)…Sun is shining but wind is blowing…temps are cool…we are making preparations to leave the dock when a sailboat (PANDORA II) and a small motor boat (HORSE WITH NO NAME) zip right by and we hear them talking to the lock master…we pull out and join the line and here comes TRITON a boat we saw in Waterford…not the way we had hoped this would start…Lockmaster lets us all through the low bridge but then makes us and Triton wait on a wall, while they lock the other boats down. So we will be locking through with TRITON all day…could be worse! The canal is very narrow…speed limit is 6 mph, sometimes only 3 mph…we are being passed by bicycles and electric wheelchairs…even a rather fat man on a really slow Vespa went zipping by us on the cart path next to the Canal. Locks and bridges are mostly timed to be open and ready for you when you arrive…We had great fun practicing our very limited French…(Dakota even barks in French now) …we had to wait on a couple of walls for other boats to pass but really it gave us time to be social with TRITON and give Dakota a grass break.  We loved it…lock workers could not have been more helpful…smooth and slow ride in every lock…wind kicked up a couple of times but we handled it just fine…Down 80 feet…10 miles in 5 hours…then we trucked on for another 20…hey, the sun was shining and Dakota had already had several potty breaks.

Charts and books we are using said more than once to “watch and be very careful going through the bridge at Beloeil” …and we did…but as we flew by, there stuck in the shallow section,  was PANDORA II…we had serious flashbacks of a bridge we encountered in Marathon…the police and another rather official looking rescue boat was there…and there really was nothing we could do…so we went on. Into the land of cable ferries…three small towns…three small cable ferries…be careful of passing too close…you’ll get caught in their cable…

St Ours lock at the end of the day…and we tied to the floating dock there to spend the night. Quiet rural setting…with two other boats of French speaking Canadians…they pretty much help and then leave you alone…cause you don’t speak the language.  Picnickers, fisherman, dogs and children… it was a busy little park area…and then who should go whizzing by with a wave and giggles…those men on PANDORA II…lol…no damage…and they went from being thirty minutes ahead of us all day to thirty minutes behind…then boom bang…two more French speaking boats arrive…one is nicknamed Captian Boom Boom…lol…not the most graceful docking…

Turned on our phones to check in …discovered all our Looper friends are stuck on the flooding Erie Canal...Dee is gonna buy a condo by us…and Ryne misses Gma and Papou…We had steak and veggies on the aft deck…it was a great ending to a great day.