Making a reservation for the US Eisenhower and Snell Seaway locks is very different from the Canadian lock reservation system. The Canadian one is easy to find and the US one is challenging to find.
The grandness of the US government infrastructure makes finding the needle in the haystack a bit time consuming. I hope this info will help other boaters find their way to making the payment as reservations in 2022 are not required, just show up with payment made on line or cash (exact change).
The US St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation as it is called is part of the Department of Transport (DOT) which can be found at the Pay.Gov website when trying to find an Agency. Select the letter “T” (https://www.pay.gov/public/browse/agencyname#T) and the first Transportation (DOT) selection is for the Seaway that opens the Agency Form Lists as it is called. Scroll down to and select “St. Lawrence Seaway Pleasure Craft Fee”. The process is self intuitive at that point, filling in the form and making payment for the Eisenhower and Snell locks online.
The nice thing is that once the fee for the two locks is paid, you get like the Canadian reservation payment system, an email indicating that payment has been made. To our surprise though, the emails instructs us to get the email printed and we do not carry a printer onboard. Had talked about it together once and at the time could not see where we would need one. The printed copy is to show proof payment for the two locks has been made. Well we we’re at anchor, well away from any city to get the email printed and it was after 5PM with plans to do the locks the next day. Thankfully the email has a phone number of a very nice person who I chatted with the next morning who indicated that the person at the lock check-in would give us an email where we could forward this email proof of payment for their hard copy. Problem solved and the check-in by radio channel 12 worked well for us at the pleasure craft dock that has room for only 2 boats at best. The challenge continues as these locks use floating bollards that we had never seen before. They work well for straight sides of power boats and not so well for the curves of sailboats. We figured out fast that we needed to nose into the bollard to make fast with a person fending off at the bow and letting the wind drift the boat against the wall with both of us fending off. Okay so there was a bit of commotion getting settled with the first lock and we were backwards in the lock as compared to the power boats but we were in control of the boat and that’s what matters. Now we waited as those that did not pay online had to put money into a bag that was lowered for the transit payment or put their printed copy of the online payment email reciept. A time consuming process but we have time. After 2 locks, we consider ourselves knowledgeable on how to deal with these in the future even though we do not like them, prefer attached 2 long ropes instead.
Another first survived so on-wards to the next challenge.
