Port Colborne, Ontario. During the 2024 Canal Days festival a staple visitor to our fair city is the Empire Sandy. She is a ‘Tall Ship’ three-masted schooner with a long history. Canal Days usually begins when she arrives and fires her port cannon, which can be heard across the city. Everywhere the sound of her cannon is heard, we know things are about to get busy. She spends the rest of the festival taking passengers on cruises around Lake Erie, and she is the star of the Sunday boat parade of lights which prefaces the firework display that marks the soft closing of the Canal Days event.
The view from her deck during the fireworks is one of the best in town, one my wife and I have been fortunate enough to enjoy several times. The next morning, as the clean up crews and vendors leave and things return to normal the Sandy heads back through the Welland Canal and across Lake Ontario back to her current home in the Toronto harbour. Sometimes, she fires the cannon again in farewell.
And across the city people raise a beverage and wish her and her crew safe travels. Until next year.
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