Under Water Logging

Along the Quebec shore of the Ottawa River just upstream from the Capital , a unique kind of logging takes place . A very few specialized licenses are given to salvage companies that specialize in the underwater recovery of logs from the edges of the river .

These huge logs sometimes 5-6 feet across are leftovers from the Boom of the last quarter of the 1800's. Massive numbers of logs travelling the spring waters of the Ottawa River from the Mattawa area ended up near the Bytown(Ottawa) filling the River to its bottom - a chaotic crush of upended logs intricately intertwined - that would remind us of pickup sticks released . From this mass , logs were freed for milling into lumber , pried out of the tangle piling against the banks. Always in the process more logs from upriver crushed in behind . As a result of the unimaginable forces of jams and River , many logs were driven like arrows into the bottom of the River where they remained . Others were split like kindling under the pressure . Most of them are in tangled puzzles like the jams they came from . These companies may only retrieve a single log a week , but the value of one log boggles the mind.