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The Old Port in downtown Montreal was a marvelous place for the Pride to lay during her short stay. Floating marina docks line a massive basin that was originally built long ago for large freighters and passenger liners. The docks, and the level of the city, tower a good 50 feet above Pride's deck. When spying her pennants flying from a distance, only the spindly spars of her top hampers show above the streets, like the arms and head of a scarecrow above a rising tide of native corn.

Our stay at Montreal coincided with the opening days of summer. In a northern land, people don't ease into summer. No, sir. They embrace it with a passion, like that thing that may never come again. In the evenings, families and couples invest the promenade in their multitudes while twilight weaves day into night with subtle yarns of blue and red. Buskers take up their positions at auspicious corners or other opportune points of pause. The music floats overhead and enwreaths the passing procession. Here's an electric guitar and a singer, there's a flute and banjo combo. Over by the promenade overlooking the port is a cello-guitar duo leaning up against the iron rail playing "Unchained Melody." Like that of a snake charmer, the music soothes and moves ordinary people into a finer state of mind in which twilight renders everything more lovely than it otherwise might seem.

Montreal is a French city. Restaurants and bistros open their doors and windows onto the open street. Each establishment has its own colony of uniformed tables, chairs, and umbrellas that spread outward across the stones from the doorway until they encounter those of the neighboring proprietor, who deploys a different color to mark the line of control. Though French is the tongue of the land, local people did not seem to hold my linguistic limitations against me. I received no dirty looks nor was I haughtily dismissed when words failed me, as they often do. It was, after all, the dawn of summer. Who could be miserly with patience in a time and place like this?

One evening, a ferocious thunderstorm tore through the Old City. Rain riddled the paving stones like a machine gunner on a rampage. The wind whipped around corners and pillars where people huddled, seeking damp sanctuary. To venture one step into the tempest was to be instantly drenched to the skin. Restaurant umbrellas along the square were abruptly inverted like waitresses with their skirts blown up. Thunder cracked like dynamite and lightening sizzled across the gray boulevards of skyway above the old stone buildings. Better that this should come now than while trying to negotiate the locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway, thought I. In due course, the tempest moved eastward and away, leaving the evening intact. The waitresses and the sun emerged from their respective hiding places. The tables were wiped dry and the cobblestones steamed while fresh places were set.

In Montreal the crew tended to the ship's detail in the normal manner. Added to the work list was cleaning up a spot or two where the river pilot introduced us to a shiny new red buoy one sunny afternoon. On the morning of departure, I tuned into the local weather, as one does. The tape recorded man spoke of gale warnings all through our area. Strange, I thought, that the sun is shining and our flags are lightly lifting in the morning air, but the man says gales are coming. There was no word of this the day before. So I listened again and then radioed Vessel Traffic Control to confirm the reports. There is no mistake, they said. There is a gale warning in effect. So I telephoned an acquaintance in Ogdensburg, New York, one hundred miles to the west, and therefore upstream in terms of the weather.

So I asked him, "How's the weather?"

He replied, "It's breezy. White caps everywhere. Breezy."

There wasn't a lot of time to make a decision because if I chose not to get underweigh, I needed to inform the pilot in ample time to avoid being charged for nothing. So I decided to stay. The crew got involved with shipboard projects. The sky remained sunny. There was a light and pleasant breeze all afternoon. Come evening, there was a slight darkening of the sky, but nothing more. At this point I knew that I had miscalculated. I had delayed sailing based on a weather report that never materialized. Now we were a day behind schedule and this so-called gale might still be out their waiting for us tomorrow. Dammit.

By the next day I felt we had no choice but to get underweigh. The forecast was muddled but contained nothing alarming. I had squandered a day already; it was time to move. When the pilot boarded the first thing he said was, "Skipper, you made a good choice not to go yesterday."

"Oh yeah?" says I.

"Yes. You see that ship over there?" He pointed to a freighter alongside the dock. "She lost control in the Seaway yesterday and broke eight frames. After we got her through, she anchored but began to drag her hooks so two tugs had to bring her to the dock. Now she has to be surveyed to decide if she can leave port or will make repairs here. It's going to be a lot of money and a lot of time. I bet you that skipper wishes he had stayed in port now."

I remarked that I never saw more than twenty knots of wind the day before.

He replied, "It was gusting 60 knots in places yesterday. They shut down the western sections of the Seaway in the morning but after that ship got into trouble they closed the whole thing."

So, it seems that we were so protected in the lee of the city and the tall docks that we had no hint of the maelstrom nearby. The clearness of the sky was easily interpreted as evidence of benign weather. All through the day as we traveled west through the Seaway, the pilot's story was confirmed by lock tenders and other mariners. So much for reading the sky; nice job forecasting, Weatherman.

Transiting the St. Lawrence Seaway requires concentration. Though the scenery is pleasant enough, few skippers would say they look forward to it. The pilots like to joke that young skippers go up and weary old men come back down. The anchorages are few and far between, and not very protected. The bottom is mostly rock and the holding mediocre. There are a zillion islands, lift bridges, bascule bridges, buoys, and other physical obstructions to tangle with. In places the current is five or six knots. The seven locks entail 30 to 40 foot lifts, each posing an opportunity for mishap. At times the channel narrows dramatically. And there is, of course, vessel traffic to monitor.

Many of the ships we met were the gargantuan Lakers. Seeing one of these vessels rounding a bend defies credulity. They loom up, monstrous and disproportional, like some sort of Dr. Seuss notion of a ship. First the bow appears, with the bridge all the way forward, followed by a bit of black hull. Then a bit more hull comes into view. And a bit more. Then more hull. And just about the time you conclude that the mid section must be constructed from corrugated rubber if the bow is ever to make the turn before the rest of the ship can catch up, the stern house and funnel come into view. The whole massive affair appears to literally bend and ooze between the islands before puffing merrily down the channel a few feet away. Sometimes it seems that if you sat down to a meal when the bow of a Laker came abreast of your own bow, you'd probably be starting dessert about the time the whole thing was past and clear.

Despite the many potential hazards, the St. Lawrence remains an interesting and enjoyable transit for me. By day, the views are engaging, especially among the Thousand Islands where American nobility built their dream castles in the days before income tax. By night, the radar work and other navigational demands provide excellent training for new officers, and a valuable refresher for the skipper. By waiting an extra day in Montreal, we faced all of this under idyllic circumstances. What with the approach of the summer solstice, there is less than six hours of darkness at night. It was a perfect transit.

Lake Ontario could have been a very different story. Our arrival at the Lake coincided with a forecast for foul winds up to 25 knots. This would be a fine sailing forecast under other circumstances but, coming as it did, it spelt death to the schedule seeing as we were already a day behind. What I did next I'm not proud of, but Pride II like all other ships (even beautiful, romantic, traditional, Baltimore Clipper, tops'l schooner rigged, wooden-hulled, 1812, Tall Ship, Goodwill Ambassadors) lives and dies by the schedule. So, while we still had a fair breeze, I motor-sailed downwind under both engines, making nearly ten knots so as to arrive at the other end of the Lake by dawn and beat the wind shift. It worked. We beat the shift and recovered the schedule. It didn't feel good motoring downwind, about as good as whipping your kids. But I reckoned it had to be done. Hey, I got whipped as a kid. Not often. Only when necessary.

The Summer Solstice itself came while we were crossing Lake Ontario, thereby protecting some wholesome community from the pagan excesses of the Pride crew. The closest we came to an appropriate ritual aboard was when the women of the crew, led by Astra, wove and then wore circlets of wild flowers upon their heads. The Latvian word for these flower crowns is "vainags." How do I know this? Astra told me. As the evening progressed and the wind increased, the wild flower petals traveled the length of the ship, so we all ended up wearing a least part of a vainag and thereby participated in the ritual in some fashion.

We entered the Welland Canal at seven in the morning, a good hour to arrive from a skipper's point of view. I was well rested and ready for a twelve hour day of negotiating locks, bascule bridges, radio comms, vessel traffic, and tie-ups. The Welland Canal connects Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. It is the other vital component of the St. Lawrence Seaway that results in a stairway to the sea from North America's midrift. Moreover, it is what allows ships to move between the two lower lakes without going over Niagara Falls like a barrel.

The lift was mostly smooth. The lock tenders were very cooperative. At the top of Lock Three, a 25 knot breeze pinned us to the wall making it awkward to leave the lock. By passing a line to the far side of the lock, we were able to warp ourselves off with the windlass and proceed.

Wind is an interesting component to transiting the locks. Upon entering a lock from below, one is relatively sheltered by the lock walls. The first sight of the lock tenders is the brims of their hard hats peering over the wall 45 feet up. You can't see their faces; you can't hear their voices; you can't get a sense for the degree of helpfulness they are inclined to render. Upon rising to the next level the vessel is fully exposed to whatever wind conditions prevail, but at least you can look the lock tenders in the eye.

Speaking of wind in the locks, an interesting characteristic of wind is that it will ricochet like a stream of water bouncing off a wall. This is evident in microcosm when entering or leaving a lock at the bottom. In a cross wind, the flags in the uppermost parts of the rig may indicate blown onto the dock face, therefore one is inclined to compensate accordingly. However, standing on deck 90 feet below the flags, you can feel the breeze on your skin coming from the opposite direction, and the vessel responds accordingly by blowing off the wall. But you get the hang of it. Quare ould world.

At Lock Seven all hell broke loose. They filled the chamber too fast and from the wrong side. Instead of the incoming water holding us against the wall as the vessel rose, the flood tore us away from the wall. The tension on the lines was too great for the crew to take up. In fact it was only the strength of the ship that prevented the cleats and bitts from being torn right out of her.
Within seconds, as the level rapidly rose, the ship arrived on the far side of the lock, a few feet from the cement wall and rapidly closing. Meanwhile the green waters of the lock chamber were transformed into a roiling brew of aerated chowder. A thirty-five foot motor yacht ahead of us in the lock snapped her lines, bent her anchor, and maneuvered crazily around the lock trying to stay off the walls. Major pucker quotient there.
Recessed in large dark holes in the lock wall, slime clad pipes hissed, roared and then spewed a stench laden mist. The crew couldn't hear one another a few feet apart above the dragon-roar din, let alone from one end of the ship to the other. The little men in hard hat brims at the top of the lock were nowhere to be seen. I felt like Odysseus undergoing one of his trials at the mercy of some mythic beast. Well, the beast has a name and it is Lock Seven. Under such circumstances, communication becomes almost irrelevant. People will do, and must do, what they think best because there is no time to explain, delegate, or formulate a plan. What emerges at such moments is best described as seamanship. Seamanship is instinct rooted in experience. It incorporates a healthy sense of self-preservation counterweighted by loyalty to the ship and to one's shipmates. At its best, seamanship can overcome terrible odds. At its worst, well, it doesn't.

In this case, seamanship came through. While in one sense there was little we could do, the few options available to us were executed wordlessly, without orders, almost like magic. I radioed the lock tenders immediately when the trouble started, but it was awhile before they could manually override the system and stop the flooding. Eventually the maelstrom subsided, the valves were re-arranged, and we enjoyed a most placid ride for the remaining portion of the lift.

The rest of the Welland Canal is an easy trip to Lake Erie. The waterway wends like a country road through fields, woodlands, and neighborhoods. Kids on bikes ride along the canal path, one hand on the bars, hollering and waving. Where drawbridges open to let us past, people climb out of their cars and stand upon the embankment to see us go by. Kids, babies, Moms, UPS men. Old folks come out and set up their folding chairs and watch. I am told there is a phone number residents can call to find out what ships are coming and when. One motivated old couple drove their motorized wheelchairs across the street to see us. We waved to one another. The boys of summer hailed us from the hoods of their cars where they reclined drinking cans of Labatts from styro-foam coolers, and summer honeys in hotpants and haltertops waved demurely from the grassy verge. Joggers wearing walkmans trotted along, intently oblivious to it all.

After transiting the Welland Canal, Pride of Baltimore II proceeded to Erie, Pennsylvania, where we spent three short days daysailing. The Erie Maritime Museum hosted us, and the crew of the Brig Niagara made us feel very welcome, albeit in absentia. We had passed Niagara when she was eastbound for Toronto. On Monday, June 25, Pride II pulled an about face and headed east for Kingston, Ontario, located at the extreme eastern end of Lake Ontario. When you are not actually homeward bound, backtracking just doesn't feel right. Throw in another couple of visits to Lock Seven and, well, you'll wonder if there is a better way. But for now we are on our way.

Watch Below,
Captain Dan Parrott