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 Route
Canal
by
Cap'n Jack Perdue
It all began
with Archimedes when he leaped out of his bath tub hollering 'Eureka!'
This famous Greek inventor in 220 B.C. had just discovered that
a body, in this case his own, displaces its own mass in water. It
took a lot of mopping up.
It then took hydraulic engineers about a millennium,
give or take a few hundred years, to realize the commercial possibilities
of this discovery. Thus, the canal principle was born. Among other
things.
...
Canals have become very popular among pleasure craft users, however,
none were originally built to accommodate them. The initial reason
for building canals has long vanished, and that's good news for
pleasure boat skippers.
...
All of these canals together constitute one of the world's greatest
networks of navigable waterways, ideal for smaller pleasure craft
yet capable of handling the needs of 50- or 60-foot luxury cruisers.
You can cast off in Georgian Bay, take the Trent-Severn
to Lake Ontario, then cross to Oswego, New York. The Oswego Canal
then joins the Erie Barge Canal that transports you to the Hudson
River, which carries you down to the Statue of Liberty in New York
Harbor and the start of the Inter-Coastal Waterway to Florida. There
is no finer cruising in the entire world.
Meanwhile in Europe, as early as the 18th century,
France was digging canals wide and deep enough to handle the big
barges built to transport the country's first wines to market. But
it was in England where they really went overboard, so to speak,
with locks and canals.
...
A thousand miles of canals, and a thousand
locks to make them navigable, have already been restored and each
year the number increases. And so does the number of Canadian and
European skippers visiting England during the summer, looking for
a different kind of cruising. For all this, we can thank old Archimedes.
(Read full article in the magazine.) (Top)
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