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St. Lawrence Closes Down for Winter Navigation Opens Again at End of A\oril vember till the end of April, F vem year, from the end of No- the mighty river St. Lawrence and gulf are closed.to navigation on. account of ice, and all Canadian sea- borne trade is diverted to the mari- time ports of Halifax N. S. and Saint John, N. B. Some idea of the severity of the winter conditions responsible for this gigantic ‘“‘freeze up,’’ may be gained by a study of the accompanying map and the following facts. The river is fed from the Great Lakes, and commences from the eastern end of Lake Ontario which is 1200 miles from Belle Isle. It is pure fresh water to a position 25 miles below the city of Quebec, and from Montreal to that point it av- erages over a mile in width. The current runs constantly down river at a rate of three to five knots to about 70 miles below Montreal, and from there to the sea it is tidal, the tides setting back and forth at about the same rates. From Montreal to Father Point is 297 miles, and the first 190 miles of this distance consists mostly of dredged channels averaging 1000 feet wide and thirty feet deep. Channels Marked By Buoys These channels are marked by 170 lighted buoys and 300 unlit buoys, all of which are removed when the ice begins to form, and re-laid when it clears about five months later. The fact that each of these buoys is moored with two anchors and two hundred feet of chain cable, gives some idea of the magnitude of the job. In addition to the buoys, there are 70 pairs of range lights in opera- tion, to aid navigation of the chan- nels. Range lights consist of two light- houses set several hundred yards apart, the front one being 30 or 40 feet higher than the rear one. They are placed at the ends of narrow channels, so that ships coming up and keeping them in line, know that they are in the center of the chan- nel. These and all other navigation lights are extinguished during the close season. The river ice begins to form towards the end of Novem- ber, first freezing over the sheltered bays on the banks and gradually ex- By ‘Lanyard’ tending into the current. The wash of ships going up and down tends to thicken the ice by breaking the slabs and washing them on top of one an- other so that they freeze together. A good deal of broken ice is car- ried down by the current from the upper reaches above Montreal, and a few cold, calm nights with the temperature hovering around zero soon has the river full of ice. Ships continue to pass up and down for a few days, breaking it up as they go, but the buoys are now being removed making navigation risky and finally it ceases completely, about Noy. 30. The freeze up is a little later in the gulf, where the harbors and _ bays usually freeze solid about the mid- dle of December, and in the open water huge fields of ice several miles square drift about in close formation. Cabot strait never freezes com- pletely over, but between January and April it fills with drift ice and is sometimes completely blocked for three weeks at a time. Towards the middle of April it breaks up rapidly, and then the first ‘“‘deep-water’’ ships of the season pass through the strait and reach Montreal about the end of the month. The master of the first ship to arrive is always presented with a gold-headed walking stick by the harbor authorities as a souvenir of the occasion. Another Entrance to Gulf The other entrance to the gulf is by Belle Isle straits, but these are plocked with ice till the middle of MaRINE REVieEw—January, 1934 June. When this breaks up, ice- bergs commence to drift in from the ocean, and form a menace to ship- ping till about the middle of August. The Belle Isle route is nevertheless resorted to as soon as it is open, for not only is it less shrouded in fog than the Cape Race route, but it cuts 130 miles off the distance from Mon- treal to Great Britain. As may be imagined, the great freeze up creates a . tremendous amount of unemployment in all branches of the shipping industry such as dock workers, stevedores, tugboats, pilots and the vast fishing fleets in the gulf. <A few find their | “Cape RACE way down to the maritime ports, but there they have their own labor problems, and intruders are not wel- comed. Montreal and Quebec get the ships from May to November; Halifax and Saint John get them from Decem- ber to April. But the two latter ports are open all the year round, and consequently are never com- pletely idle from a shipping stand- point. Distances in Nautical Miles River and Gulf of St. Lawrence Transatlantic Montreal to QuebeGr. ae icrecci 139 Quebec to Father Point (Pilot and QUATANTING StATION). cccccseccene sc: 158 Father Point to Belle Isle.........0....... 560 Father Point to Cape Race .............. 672 Montreal to Bishop Rock (Scillies) Viae Belle Isles eey ct cores ceca soe ess 2680 Montreal to Bishop Rock via Cape NEU sVol eee ROE A ee ccrn Ce peter 2808 Bishop Rock to London (Graves- CT) cecccsesscevccercncecsoeasesccenensasoroserancesenees 380