Today we experienced our first of eighteen locks that we will travel through this week as we went from The Neva River and Lake Ladoga to the Svir River. This was a fairly quick process as it only took around half an hour to get through. Our Captain and crew had excellent communication for this process as the width of our ship is 54.8 feet and the lock is 59 feet. Sort of like putting your car in a garage only you have unpredictable water to contend with. In this process we were raised around 25 feet as we were put inside the large concrete box and water was added at the rate of 325 cubic yards per second. We have two more locks today which should happen around dinner time. It looks like we will go through 7 locks tomorrow so there will be plenty of time to get to know this process.
It is 6:30 pm and we are now going through our second lock and it is a lot longer than our first as they are sending two cruise ships through at once, we are also a lot closer to the walls of the lock this time as it looks like if I had very long arms I would be able to touch the walls of the lock. Ok, not only does it look like it, I just saw one man who could. So I just need to keep trying.
Towards Moscow we experienced some wider locks where two boats could go through side by side, they hook the ship by ropes to hooks in the wall to keep the ship in place and after the ship is at the right level, these ropes are released. We also experienced two types of gates, ones that open to the sides and the second lowered down and the ship floated over it.