After our departure from the Erie Canal and Buffalo River, we found our way early last night to the Welland Ship Canal. Now in its fourth configuration, the canal runs, in its entirety, 27 miles from Port Colborne, Ontario on Lake Erie to Port Weller, Ontario on Lake Ontario. As part of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the canal allows ships to avoid Niagara Falls by navigating the Niagara Escarpment.

While the first configuration - which opened for a trial run in November 1829 - contained at least 40 locks, this newest one, completed in 1932, consists of eight locks, seven at the Niagara Escarpment and the eighth, a control lock, at Port Colborne to control the depth of the canal.

The Guardian entered into the system from Lake Erie, passing through locks 8-1, in that order. From the first to the last lock in the system (between Lakes Erie and Ontario), there is an elevation change of about 327 feet.

If you’ve never experienced going through a lock before, here’s a visual snapshot of how it looks – think of it as going from the top to the bottom of a ladder, except with a lot of water in between.

And here are some video clips of the doors of a lock opening to let the Guardian through …

After finishing with the canal’s locks late last evening, we made our way to Youngstown, NY. We moored at the Coast Guard Station, home to Old Fort Niagara, which played a significant part in the French and Indian War, and fell to the British in a 19 day siege in July 1759, called the Battle of Fort Niagara.

Today, the teachers briefly leave the Guardian to catch and study live fish, including bass, perch and carp. But, before they do, they were the students for a “Geology and the Niagara River” 101 crash course lead by Susan Diachun and Carol Rodgers from New York State Parks at a nearby Nature Center. The hope is that they’ll later pass along this information to their own students via science curricula.

In addition to learning about the various sedimentary layers that make up the rock beds of the Niagara area (dolomites, sandstones and shale), many were surprised to hear that up to 75% of the Niagara River’s natural flow is used to produce hydro-electric power. Some teachers learned for the first time an array of interesting facts about the Great Lakes, incuding: Lake Ontario, the smallest in shoreline miles, is where all the other Great Lakes waters drain into. In fact, in the interconnected Great Lakes system, it takes an average of seven years for water from Lake Superior (which holds the largest and most volume of all the Lakes) to get to Niagara Falls. Lake Michigan is the only of the Great Lakes that’s located fully in the U.S. And Lake Erie, the shallowest of the bunch, is connected to Lake Ontario via the Niagara River.

After the brief lesson on lakes and rivers, the group met with U.S. Fish and Wildlife (USFWS) biologists (lead by Dr. Kofi Fynn-Aikins and Mike Goehle) at the docks at Youngstown’s Coast Guard Station for an electro-shocking display and discussion on Great Lakes contaminants. First, Goehle and other USFWS technicians used equipment to shock fish species - including, pictured below, (1) red horse suckers, (2) small mouth bass and (3) yellow perch - then scoop them up in nets. Fish were placed in a cooler aboard a boat and identified for teachers and reporters from the Buffalo News and Niagara Gazette before being released back into the Niagara River.

During the demonstation, Michelle Tabone, a seventh-grade science teacher at Buffalo Public School No. 197, told the Buffalo News reporter that she was taking the program “to give my students a first-hand experience on [the study of the lake’s environment] through me. I want to show them all the work the government does” to study and help preserve the lake.

Finally, USFWS’s Fynn-Aikins (pictured below, left, with NYSG’s Helen Domske) addressed the group of teachers to discuss how contaminants affect fish and wildlife in the Great Lakes. “What do you do with your unwanted pharmaceuticals?” he asked. “Most people pour them down the drain.” Proper disposal of unwanted medicines is a growing concern that a number of Sea Grant programs, led by Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant, are raising the profile on (click here for more). Toxins like mercury and flame-retardant products are not the only ones that can have some noticable, severe impacts on fish species. Remnants from birth control products can reverse the sex of some fish. And that’s just one example. Says Fynn-Aikins, “It’s really an alphabet soup out there in these waters. And so, it’s a constant challenge to understand what’s exactly happening.”