FRIDAY JUNE 10TH, 2011

We left Peterborough with a plan to reach Burleigh Falls by the end of the day.

That plan was cut short when we learned the hydro (power) still wasn’t back on at the lock in Burleigh Falls from the storm the other night. Our second lock of the day was the Peterborough lift lock. It’s the largest hydraulic lift lock in the world. Built between 1896 and 1904, it was one of the world’s largest concrete structures. And that’s just concrete, not reinforced concrete. Reinforced concrete was just starting to be used at this point and most engineers were very skeptical of it.












I can only describe this lock as amazing! There are two large chambers, or tubs filled with water. We drove in to the lower chamber and tied up. Then they fill the chamber that’s way up in the air with an additional foot of water. This foot of water adds 144 tons of weight to that chamber. Being it weighs more, it lowers and raises the chamber we’re in. There’s some hydraulics going on too, but I don’t begin to understand that enough to explain it.





Once we were in the chamber on the left side of the lock, it looked like this.


















 

Its fast and only took us 10 minutes to go from bottom to top. 65 feet. Here’s what it looked like out of the back of the lock up at the top. Pretty amazing, eh? (did you catch my Canadian accent there?)



















This is a link to a YouTube video if you want to see the lock in action. If you click on the underlined part it should bring you directly to the YouTube video of the PETERBOROUGH LIFT LOCK

We stopped for the night at Youngs Point and tied up along the lock wall. Maybe the Burleigh Falls lock will have power tomorrow and we’ll be able to move along. If not, we’ll wait. There is not power here for us, or Internet so we feel out of communication. The boat ahead of us on the wall is from Toronto so they are able to call the lock and find out what’s happening and then they share info with us. Just have to go with the flow.