Maritime History makes good bike paths!

The best known and most popular bike path in Montreal is the one that follows the old Lachine Canal from the Old Port to Lachine.

Prior to 1959 and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Lachine Canal was the gateway to and from the Great Lakes for all cargo transported by ship. Ocean ships could only go as far as Montreal, and the Lakers stopped at Prescott with a series of smaller canals and ships (known as Canalers) providing the transshipment link between the two.


Decades of negotiations between Canada and the US went by about creating the new Seaway before any actual construction took place.





The remnants of these old canals have become ideal locations for bike paths such as the old Cornwall Canal in Eastern Ontario.

This path along the old canal and continuing to Lamoureux Park along the waterfront in Cornwall is considered part of the Waterfront Trail network in Ontario - http://www.waterfronttrail.org/trail-s-7.html. However, unlike most of the supposed Waterfront Trail along the Ontario portion of the St. Lawrence River, which basically follows the highway 2 road with or without paved shoulder, the municipality of Cornwall has actually created a very nice bike path.

Unfortunately, a new bridge is being built to replace the Seaway International Bridge so that the section along the path under the bridge is closed during weekdays.

Fortunately, it was a Sunday morning so I could pass through and pedal along the old canal section, passing old locks and stopping at the Visitor's Centre for the power dam.

The old canal seems to have no use except as some form of runoff for the dam though it doesn't appear to have an torrents of water passing by.

It seems a waste not to put such a fine resource to some use similar to the water activities on the Lachine Canal.


There is, however, a nice little marina in Cornwall harbour at the east end of Lamoureux Park.

Cornwall has really tried to keep the spirit of the Waterfront trail, even building a bridge behind the freight shed on the Ocean dock to allow cyclists to follow the river out of Cornwall and continue on east to the Quebec border.

Only an hour's drive from Montreal, Cornwall would make a nice day trip for a bike outing and to soak up some Maritime History along the way.

Ships passing at Iroquois Lock

Iroquois Lock is a control lock in the St. Lawrence Seaway with almost no change in level, but ships must still slow down as they approach, pass through and leave the lock so it can be an area of congestion.

Multi-tasking

Navigation lights and buoys on the St. Lawrence Seaway perform the dual function of aiding mariners to safely navigate the river while at the same time making for a ready base for many Osprey couples to nest and have their young.

Sometimes those functions conflict.

Bridge over the bridge

Working occasionally in the Beauharnois Canal area to the west of Montreal has provided an opportunity to see some of the construction of the new Highway 30 bridge being built near the upstream end of Beauharnois Lock #4. http://www.na30.ca/?lang=en-CA

It is a pretty impressive sight when viewed from up close or seen spanning the entire canal.

I'm sure Ontarians and Maritimers will be ecstatic when it is completed and they will be able to go around the island of Montreal instead of needing to traverse the dreaded 20 or 40. Hopefully, it will help alleviate some of the on-island traffic for Montrealers too.


Still, if you are not on a bicycle, you can't beat travelling by water even if you are a windmill part.

Second Home Sweet Home

After five months away from work it feels good to be back on the water again. Just like riding a bike, it doesn't take long to get the swing of things.

For the bird fanciers, there are lots of opportunities to check out the ospreys using navigation lights in the river for creating nests for their young.

Not every sight on the river is pleasing. It is not only large cities like Montreal that suffer from the blight of inappropriate development. Brockville use to be a pleasant place to pass on the river.

Sideways

My first ride out along the Lachine Canal had to be shortened when my ankle started complaining so I stopped by the caboose/cantine where the path crosses the canal at Avenue Dollard.

In any case, it was nice to be near any body of water as I pondered my imminent return to work on my ship after four months of recovery.

A large portion of the work conducted by the Coast Guard is deploying, recovering and maintaining aids to navigation such as buoys. So, it was with a professional and critical eye that I regarded the spar buoy near the bridge. (The buoys in the Lachine Canal are maintained by Parks Canada and not the Coast Guard.)

These buoys are made of plastic with polystyrene inside and some added weight in the bottom to act as ballast. They are designed to float upright with about two thirds of the body of the buoy submerged. However, the trick is to determine how much weight to add to the bottom of the buoy to get it to float right otherwise it will lean over as in the picture above.



Here is where Math class comes in. You need to determine how deep in the water the buoy will float just by its own weight alone and then determine how much more weight it will take to float the buoy to the right depth. In order to do this, you will need the dimensions of the buoy such as this one from Tideland:

From here we go back to Archimedes Principle that states that an object immersed in water will displace a volume of water equal to the object's weight. If the volume of the object compared to its weight is greater than the volume of water of the same weight, then the object will float.

Now, since the body of the buoy is shaped like a cylinder, we can work out the amount of the buoy that will be submerged due to its own weight.

From the information given in the specifications, the weight of the buoy is 39kg.

The formula for the area of a circle is:  Area = Pi x R x R. For the cross section of our buoy this works out to: 3.14 x 18.4 x 18.4, which comes out to 1,063.6 square centimeters. Since, a cubic centimeter of fresh water weighs 1 gram, then submerging the buoy 1 centimeter will displace 1.0636 kg of water.

So, given the weight of the buoy of 39kg, the buoy will be submerged 39/1.0636 or 36.7 centimeters in the water.

However, the length of the body of the buoy is 124 centimeters and we want to submerge the buoy up to 2/3 of its length, which would be 83 centimeters. The difference between 83 and 36.7 is 46.3 centimeters, and since each centimeter further into the water displaces 1.0636 kg of water, the weight needed to add to the bottom of the buoy to float it properly is 46.3 x 1.0636 or 49.2kg.

The reason buoys are designed to float properly only by adding weight to them is because they are anchored to the bottom, usually with chain. If the buoy floated properly by itself then it would sink too low in the water once the chain was attached to it. In addition, buoys can be placed in varying depths of water so that the weight of the submerged chain pulling down on the buoy will vary with the depth of water.

In some cases, where the water is deep enough, the weight of the chain is sufficient to float the buoy properly. However, in shallow water, there is not enough chain weight to submerge the buoy the correct amount so we have to add additional weight, which we call a counterweight.

So, in places like the Lachine Canal, if you see a buoy leaning over sideways it is because it has lost its counterweight or the person who put it out there in the first place didn't do his job properly!