Saturday night, we'd hatched plans to do an escape room then go do some shopping (Costco, groceries, and possibly some other things).  We'd decided to move from the wall down to Dow's Lake to get us through the time-restricted bridge while it's the weekend and easy. Locks and bridges don't open in the mornings until 9am, and with our work schedules, the earlier we can move, the further we can get before we have to get to work. So we try to optimize around not having to hurry-up-and-wait. It also helps that leaving the wall would give us some more room, fewer weeds, and better internet (on the wall downtown, Starlink was just constantly freaking out for whatever reason).

So we headed out toward the lake, and decided that, while we were here, we should pump out our holding tanks. However, the wall with the pumpout/water/fuel dock was made for far smaller boats than us, so we ended up fendering up the two bows of our hulls, and just nosed into the dock and tied off that way. We pumped out, filled back up with water (we don't really want to watermake on a canal), and then pulled alongside Russ/Jax, who had dropped anchor and were hanging out.

We dinghied ashore with bikes and scooters, of which both of our groups forgot something important on the boats and had to go back. Eventually we got our act together and scooted/biked back to Byward Market to do our escape room, which we rocked, and then had a great lunch in a traditional Ottawa courtyard that had been suggested during the walking tour yesterday.

During lunch we decided to call an audible and get all the way through the first set of locks to avoid being time-limited in the morning (locks open at 9am, which is complicated with our work schedule), so we headed back to Dow's Lake, packed up and dinghied back to the boats, and got back under way.

As it turns out, there was also another set of locks that none of us had noticed on the map, between the lake and where we were going, our afternoon of a quick jaunt and 1 lock turned into an extra passage through a set of double-locks, where Highwind joined two other boats already in the locks, who turned out to be gang who couldn't shoot straight, and it took forever, since we had to be behind them all the way through the next segment and up the last lock for the day as well.

We eventually tied up on the wall just past lock 12 and ran over to the nearby grocery store to top off on non-bulk-goods while we waited for Inquest to make the next lock cycle. As soon as they pulled up, we helped them tie off, grabbed an Uber to Costco, closed out the Costco, grabbed an UberXL to get home with all of our crap, and carted it all aboard to stow. We made a nice quick dinner for the boats out of fresh Salmon and some other misc. stuff we'd just bought, and called it an early night again, glad that we'd made it through these locks on the weekend while it's easy.