Welland Canal and Detroit River Timelapse

Shot with GoPro HD Hero2 1080p Wide
The Welland Canal is a ship canal in Ontario, Canada, connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Traversing the Niagara Peninsula from Port Weller to Port Colborne, the canal forms a key section of the St. Lawrence Seaway, enabling ships to ascend and descend the Niagara Escarpment and bypass Niagara Falls.
Approximately 40,000,000 tonnes of cargo are carried through the Welland Canal annually by a traffic of about 3,000 ocean and Great Lakes vessels. This canal was a major factor in the growth of the city of Toronto. The original canal and its successors allowed goods from Great Lakes ports such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, as well as heavily industrialized areas of the United States and Ontario, to be shipped to the port of Montreal or to Quebec City, where they were usually reloaded onto ocean-going vessels for international shipping.
By providing a relatively short and direct connection to Lake Erie, the Welland Canal eclipsed other, narrower canals in the region as a commercial traffic route for Great Lakes navigation, such as the Trent-Severn Waterway and, significantly, the Erie Canal, which linked the Atlantic and Lake Erie via New York City and Buffalo, New York.
The southern, Lake Erie terminus of the canal is 99.5 metres (326.5 feet) higher than the northern terminus on Lake Ontario. The canal includes eight 24.4 metre (80 foot)-wide ship locks.[1] Seven of the locks (Locks 1-7, the 'Lift locks') are 233.5 metres (766 feet) long and raise (or lower) passing ships by between 43 (13.01 m) and 49 feet (14.94 m) each. The southernmost lock, (Lock 8 - the 'Guard' or 'Control' lock) is 349.9 m (1,148 feet) in length.[2] The Garden City Skyway passes over the canal, restricting the maximum height of the masts of the ships allowed on this canal to 35.5 metres (116.5 feet). All other highway or railroad crossings of the Welland Canal are either movable bridges (of the vertical lift or bascule bridge types) or subterranean tunnels. The maximum permissible length of a ship in this canal is 225.5 metres (740 feet). It takes ships an average of about eleven hours to traverse the entire length of the Welland Canal. We did it in about 7 hours.