(no subject)
Road Tour 2010: East Finland
Warning: the following entry is sheer geekery, with loads of nearly identical pictures of poor quality. Read only if you are harbouring a secret nerd inside yourself.
A canal, and a lock!
Boring history and facts *beams*
Since the 15th century Finns have been trying to connect lake Saimaa and the Baltic Sea with a 43 km/27 mile canal. The first attempts luckily didn't succeed, as the engineers from that time might easily have emptied the entire (huge) lake into the sea. In 1856 the first (working, non-lake-emptying) canal was opened, and the canal has been widened and improved twice since then. The lift of the canal is 76 metres/248 feet, meaning that the LAKE is that much higher than the sea. There are eight locks keeping the lake water in the lake, so on the average each lock drops/raises the ship 9.5 metres/31 feet (Wow!! The nerd in me is cheering!). As there are other canals on the Finnish side, the Saimaa canal now connects 120 inland lakes with the Baltic Sea, creating a waterway for both travellers and goods still very much in use.
After ww2, about one half of the canal is in the Finish turf, and the other half in the Russian, a fact that still causes some static between the countries (Finland is now paying rent for a canal they built themselves...)
Here's what I'm talking about, the map again
shamelessly stolen from some web site.
With the excuse of educating our children (when in fact it was Spouse and me wanting to travel through, ooooh, a lock!), we took a two hour cruise from Lappeenranta. The ship went through the first lock (in the Finnish side), made an U-turn right after and came back, so we got to live both sides of the lock experience.
And, in order to make things clear, I'm facing (most of the time) to the BACK of the ship.
Into the canal we go, ho ho!
And then there's the lock, Mälkiä! So neat!
The gate, the gate! It's raising!
And the gulls go wild!
And then the water starts to sink, it's let out of the lock from the front gate.
And we are sinking, sinking! 13 metres/43 feet lower in a watery canyon!
And the front gate is opened and out we sail
U-turn and back into the lock
The gate, it's closing! Notice last minute kamikaze gull.
The gulls are having another party inside the lock. I didn't see them catch
anything at all in there, maybe it's just cool to hang out in the lock?
Almost on the lake level now, and the gate to the lake is opened.
Also, it's not just us nerdy tourists using the canal now (you can sail
all the way to Vyborg from there, a mythical Finnish city from old times,
now firmly in the Russian side of the border), it's also real working ships,
like this one from St. Petersburg.
And, here's Bramble's sketches and explanations of how it all works.
(Hmm. I wonder if it's at all visible...)
Other than locks :D
Along the canal, whatever you do, do NOT place your anchor upside down!
Our waves in the canal
Electricity can't travel in boats so it has to hop from island to island.
Timber is still floated through the waterways to the paper mill. Apparently
it's still the most cost efficient way of moving the logs about, and as
they still need to get them wet, that too happens in the same time.
The logs are, these days, tied together in rafts, the rafts together in
long trains, and then there's a tugboat that pulls them wherever they need to get.
(Yes, there was a Mount Kilimanjaro of sawdust next to this mill as well ;)
Hooray, us nerds!
Warning: the following entry is sheer geekery, with loads of nearly identical pictures of poor quality. Read only if you are harbouring a secret nerd inside yourself.
A canal, and a lock!
Boring history and facts *beams*
Since the 15th century Finns have been trying to connect lake Saimaa and the Baltic Sea with a 43 km/27 mile canal. The first attempts luckily didn't succeed, as the engineers from that time might easily have emptied the entire (huge) lake into the sea. In 1856 the first (working, non-lake-emptying) canal was opened, and the canal has been widened and improved twice since then. The lift of the canal is 76 metres/248 feet, meaning that the LAKE is that much higher than the sea. There are eight locks keeping the lake water in the lake, so on the average each lock drops/raises the ship 9.5 metres/31 feet (Wow!! The nerd in me is cheering!). As there are other canals on the Finnish side, the Saimaa canal now connects 120 inland lakes with the Baltic Sea, creating a waterway for both travellers and goods still very much in use.
After ww2, about one half of the canal is in the Finish turf, and the other half in the Russian, a fact that still causes some static between the countries (Finland is now paying rent for a canal they built themselves...)
Here's what I'm talking about, the map again
shamelessly stolen from some web site.
With the excuse of educating our children (when in fact it was Spouse and me wanting to travel through, ooooh, a lock!), we took a two hour cruise from Lappeenranta. The ship went through the first lock (in the Finnish side), made an U-turn right after and came back, so we got to live both sides of the lock experience.
And, in order to make things clear, I'm facing (most of the time) to the BACK of the ship.
Into the canal we go, ho ho!
And then there's the lock, Mälkiä! So neat!
The gate, the gate! It's raising!
And the gulls go wild!
And then the water starts to sink, it's let out of the lock from the front gate.
And we are sinking, sinking! 13 metres/43 feet lower in a watery canyon!
And the front gate is opened and out we sail
U-turn and back into the lock
The gate, it's closing! Notice last minute kamikaze gull.
The gulls are having another party inside the lock. I didn't see them catch
anything at all in there, maybe it's just cool to hang out in the lock?
Almost on the lake level now, and the gate to the lake is opened.
Also, it's not just us nerdy tourists using the canal now (you can sail
all the way to Vyborg from there, a mythical Finnish city from old times,
now firmly in the Russian side of the border), it's also real working ships,
like this one from St. Petersburg.
And, here's Bramble's sketches and explanations of how it all works.
(Hmm. I wonder if it's at all visible...)
Other than locks :D
Along the canal, whatever you do, do NOT place your anchor upside down!
Our waves in the canal
Electricity can't travel in boats so it has to hop from island to island.
Timber is still floated through the waterways to the paper mill. Apparently
it's still the most cost efficient way of moving the logs about, and as
they still need to get them wet, that too happens in the same time.
The logs are, these days, tied together in rafts, the rafts together in
long trains, and then there's a tugboat that pulls them wherever they need to get.
(Yes, there was a Mount Kilimanjaro of sawdust next to this mill as well ;)
Hooray, us nerds!