Three flights over rivers

We're home after a weekend's flight to Kingston (via a meandering route) and back (in a straight line), following a variety of rivers. For the first leg we overflew the south bank of the Ottawa as far as Hawkesbury, crossing there and cutting across the fields to Lachute for yesterday's lunch, three of our friends bringing their own 'planes this far as well. The recently warmed air (as warm as 20°, at altitude!) is so smooth and hazy it suddenly seems like mid-summer, though the woods are still edged with melting snowdrifts and ice lingers in the shallow inlets of the river. Between Ottawa and Hawkesbury is the mouth of the South Nation River which I mentioned a week ago, the fields in the distance still flooded where it had burst its banks (as in the picture on the left, above).

In the afternoon we flew south (13° to the east of true south because of the magnetic variation in these parts) right over the Carillon Dam and down to the St Lawrence River, turning west towards Cornwall rather than crossing it, so that we wouldn't drift across the U.S. border by mistake. Following the line of the river all the way to its origin at Kingston we saw three international bridges, the one at Cornwall, the one crossing from Prescott to Ogdensburg and the one across the islands near Rockport and Gananoque. On our approach to Kingston airport we also crossed the Cataraqui River at which we had to "report entering the zone" of Kingston's airspace. We took another look at the Cataraqui later on, after supper. If you take a boat on the "Cat" River (as ATC called it) past the yellow tug you enter the Rideau Canal system and can eventually reach Ottawa by this route.

Today, after a free ride as foot passengers on the Wolfe Island ferry across the stretch of water where the Cataraqui meets Lake Ontario and Lake Ontario merges into the St. Lawrence, we left Kingston behind and took to the air again, following the line of Rideau lakes across the rocky country to Smiths Falls, where the Rideau River squeezes itself through some locks.

Then into the Rockcliffe circuit for Runway 09, with a view of the foam floating down the Ottawa River (past the mouth of the Gatineau River) from the Rideau Falls.