A Wind-O-Meter - who has this?

• When we were kids mom used to say its Blowin' Stink!

• The wind is so strong it is Blow'n dogs off chains

• It's blowing the fur off a weasel

• It is blow'n monkeys out of trees

• A kiwi I know says "it's blowing like forty thousand bastards!"

• Its a good day for a sail

But here is my favorite:

"Some people like to talk about the weather. Well, around these parts, we have this thing called a Wind-O-Meter. It is a log chain up top of a pole. Most days that log chain stands just about straight out. But when the links commence to snapping, you know that we are in for some windy weather."

Today, on the Trent Waterway System, we were going through, what most were finding very strong winds and when you are boating and trying to dock in windy weather, it is no fun. I say, thank god we now have two engines and some crew that was able to handle the lines in the wind. And I think the wind chain was standing straight out as well.

We left Frankfort from the top of Lock 6 at 8:30 am with the goal of reaching Hastings by the time they close the locks at 6 pm. It certainly was windy and with the fast running waters exiting the dams at most lock sites, we had to deal with the currents and winds. On average we had 35 km to 40 km winds coming from all directions and there were a couple locks that did not have much protection, where we saw gusts to 55 km and greater. I am here to report that we did make it through all locks successfully and did arrive in Hastings at 5 pm.

We had some fun playing with the birds today however we were only able to get some video of our game with the Geese. We also had swans in front of the boat that refused to leave but all we managed to get was a photo of them flying away, but they are a very large bird with a big wingspan.

The geese, on the other hand, really refused to move but I gave them a bit of a challenge by chasing them with the boat. Please excuse my video as I had to steer and speed up and video at the same time but it is kinda funny how they are persistent about taking up some prime real estate on the water. Enjoy this video,

As we travelled through a couple of locks we had time to talk to the staff because we were the only boat running northbound on the Trent. It was a quiet day for them. We did find out why this one walking bridge is sitting alongside the canal with no mechanism to swing it. Apparently, the drive assembly broke and it was very expensive to repair, so instead, Parks Canada bought a new pickup truck, outfitted the swing bridge with a trailer hitch and the pickup truck now drives forward to swing the bridge closed and backs up to move it back to the open canal position. Strange way to do this but it works.

Even though it was a quiet day, we saw a few interesting sights especially the tug boat and the fire truck and rescue vehicle that was alongside us for a while in the canal. We hope it was not an emergency stop.

Bruce and Chester found it easier today, even though we had strong winds. Bruce worked the bow while Chester found a way to work the Stern while relaxing on the aft bench seat.

The Campblleford Lock was an interesting large lock and we had to do some research to come up with data for our blog. The lock is a double lift, meaning you boat into one lock and when it is full they open the door for you to exit, and you boat into the second chamber and are then lifted to the top. On this particular lock each chamber lifts you 24 feet so overall the lift is 48 feet from the bottom to the top.

Each of the locks is 154 feet long and 32 feet wide and the water fill was to a depth of 24 feet. When you work this out it is a total of 118,272 cu. ft. of water which is 7.48 US Gallons of water per cubic foot. This means that they added 884,675 US Gallons of water and we timed the lift at 6 minutes. This equates to 14,744 US gallons per minute or 245 Gallons per second. This is 945 Liters per second. This is the lock that was filled in the 6 minute timeline.

Tomorrow we will be leaving Hastings at 7 am for a 4 hour run, as there are no locks between Hastings and Peterborough. One of our challenges this week is to make up canal time as best we can, because they are working new and shorter lock hours The canal opens at 10 am and closes at 3:30 so we can't get through locks before or after those times. Stay tuned for more updates tomorrow.

Here is our Nebo Log for today. We ran 70.3 KM today over 6.37 hours and had an average speed of 11.1 km per hour