Plans for summer, 2012

     Planning for the summer of 2012 is well underway and charts and books have been collected.  We will return to OASIS shortly after Christina and Dave get married the weekend of May 26th.  There are a number of jobs to be done on the tug, mostly cosmetic this year, i.e. painting and a little carpentry. 
     We intend to go north of Clay, NY to Oswego for a careful trip across the eastern end of Lake Ontario and the Thousand Islands area of the St. Lawrence River.  The mouth of the Trent-Severn Canal is located via a twisty route to Trenton, Ontario and our official entry into Canada.  The TS canal will be an out-and-back trip as far as the Peterborough Ship-Lift.  We were at the twinning of the two shiplifts in Canada at a July 1986 ceremony held in Belgium at the site of four lifts built there.  Two other lifts are in England and France. After returning to the St. Lawrence river we will look for Kingston and the Rideau Canal which takes us to Ottawa, the capital of Canada.  After descending the 8-rise set of locks, the Ottawa River, now in French-speaking Quebec, takes us down to Montreal and again to the St. Lawrence.  This will take us to Sorel at the mouth of the Richelieu River.  The Richelieu and the Chambly Canal will return us to the USA at the northern end of Lake Champlain.  The Teitelbaums will join us somewhere in the Ottawa/Montreal area and travel with us for a week, hopefully to the US border.  The Tugboat Roundup held the 2nd weekend of September is the next goal and is due south across the lake and down the Champlain Canal.to Waterford.  All that is encompassed in this paragraph is known as the Little Loop.  Then it is back to Clay, NY and the Pirates' Cove Marina for more winter storage.